It's been a while since the last one of these, but now as we're celebrating midsummer and nightless nights here in Finland, I think its time for me to sit down and write a bit of a catch-up post about what's going on with MUTA, the Multi-User Timewasting Activity.

Officially developing an MMORPG solo

To recap, MUTA is a free and open source MMOPRG project started in 2017 as a student project. The idea for it came from myself and another Kajaani UAS student, Lommi, as we had both been talking of writing an MMO for a while. In fact, wanting to write an MMO was the primary reason I personally applied to the school's game development programme.

We spent two full project courses, each 2-3 months long, on writing the game. During that time we got much assistance from many different people. Game art students created art, and programming students helped us with some great tools and certain parts of the engine, and production students helped us get organized.

MUTA after 2 months of development, during a test with around 20 people online. The 64x64 art at this point was created by three Singaporean summer school students.

After (and between) said courses, it was just me and Lommi working on the game. I'm more of an engine guy, he's more of a gameplay guy, though neither of us is one thing exclusively. While it initially only took us two and a half months to get an OK-looking demo game running, writing an MMO engine and toolset properly takes a lot of time. And while such tools are in development, content creation is difficult, if not impossible. The lack of visible progress during a technology development phase such as this, I think, is problematic for people who are primarily driven by gameplay and visuals, and so after a while, I was mostly working on the game alone, always telling my friend I would try to get the engine and tools ready for content-development ASAP.

Last month, Lommi finally told me he felt the project was too big for him to work on it on the side at this point (he's also employed full-time and has been for quite a while). That leaves me as the only official developer of MUTA. But that's not such a big change after all: likely more than 90% of the current codebase was already written by me alone at this point, as Lommi has not really been involved during the last year or more.

In fact, it's a bit of a relief for me. I no longer need to worry about getting the game ready for others to develop content for it. I'm working a full-time job and try to spend the time I can on MUTA, but often time is simply hard to come by.

With this organizational shift in mind, I have some more changes coming up. I'm planning on reworking the theme of the game and possibly making the art myself. I'm a terrible artist, so it will probably come to simple indie pixel crap. But that's alright, the gameplay is the important part. As for the theme, I'm planning on simple high fantasy, due to the fact I'm not good enough of a visual artist to present a universe anything like what we originally planned for - the original idea was a sword and sorcery -type world inspired by the works of Robert E. Howard. I'm of the opinion that the theme should support the gameplay and not the other way around. However, I don't want to see fireballs flying all over in the style of Warcraft either - it's gonna be something lower key than that.

Character "art" from my first-ever game project, Isogen.

For now, MUTA remains a hobby project I try to pour much of my free time into. Time will tell what it actually evolves into, but I've got high hopes that one day it will be a real, online MMORPG. If not that, at least the code will be available for anyone to inspect.

Code changes

Phew, it's been many months since I last wrote about MUTA, so a lot of things have changed in the codebase, and some of them I don't even remember anymore. Some of the changes include (in a semi-chronological order):

   
• Reworking of the immediate mode GUI into a standalone library.
   
• Shared code cleanup (mostly just renaming things and organizing them into files)
   
• Moving to MojoAL from OpenAL Soft on at least GNU/Linux. I don't know how great of an idea this is, but MojoAL is easy to embed into the project, having only two source files as opposed to OpenAL Soft's CMake hell.
   
• New entity system for the client.
   
• Rewriting the client's rendering.
   
• Completely rewriting the master server.
   
• Writing a world database server.
   
• Writing a new async database API.
   
• packetwriter2 tool for network message serialization.
   
• Shared API and authentication for server-server connections (svchan_server and svchan_client).
   
• New generic hashtable written as a separate library.

Client entity system

The entity system on the client needed a rework. It was something of an entity-component system (and I know how pretentious that term is) and remains so. This job had two distinct motivations:

   
• Making the code clearer
   
• Performance

I feel like both goals were achieved. First of all, the code needed breaking into more source files as previously the whole world code was in a single file (I feel this sort of isolation is more future-proof for this project), but second, I really wanted less weird macros and more flexibility in component implementation. To recap the new system:

   
• An entity has a fixed-size array of components.
   
• Each component has an enumerator it's referred with. The enum is an    index to an entity's component array.
   
• Components in an entity generally point to a handler structure. The    component might have an iterable element in a tight array associated with    it, but this is not visible to the component's user - they access it    through a set of functions.
   
• Components communicate mainly through events (callbacks).

Components are defined by creating an instance of a static-duration component_definition_t struct.

So the component_definition_t structure is really just a set of callbacks. Components are also pooled, but the pools are members of world instances, hence not visible int he above example (the functions just accept a pointer to a world_t, as seen).

Using a component definition, components can be added to an entity and then manipulated.

The component handle returned by entity_attach_component can be used to access the component. It could be laid out in memory in various ways - the API does not set restrictions on this, except that the handle must be a constant address pointer until destruction.

Component event callbacks are attached to the component definitions rather than individual components. This does away with some flexibility, but saves memory and likely performs better in the average case, since in MUTA, certain sets of components in a single entity type are very common (creatures have a certain set of components, players another, etc.) The callbacks get called mostly immediately when a component fires an event. An example use case of events would be animations: when the mobility component fires a "start move" event, the event can trigger the animation component to start playing a different animation.

Rewriting the client's rendering

This one's a pretty simple one. Tile depth sorting was moved to the GPU, and with the new entity system, entity rendering was also changed.

Previously, the world rendering system walked through each rendering component in the world every frame, looked up the entity's position from a separate memory address, then decided whether to cull it or not, and so on. In the new system, positions are cached in more CPU cache-friendly structures. For example, if a entity moves, an event is fired to it's rendering component, and the rendering component logic culls the entity and caches its position in an array of render commands. The array of render commands is iterated through every frame to draw all visible entities - render commands contain all the necessary data to place the entity's sprites properly on the screen.

Master server rewrite

The master server is the authoritative part of a single MUTA shard/world. It knows all the entities in the world and generates unique IDs for everything. Multiple simulation servers connect to the master server, each one of them simulating different parts of the world map.

While writing MUTA's proxy server (of which I also wrote my bachelor thesis), I feel like I finally "got" how I want to do multithreading with servers: handle all state on one thread, have other threads post events to that thread. The event loop works with a wait function akin to poll. Basically, an event-based approach.

Since then, I've been wanting to rewrite the rest of MUTA's server applications to use a similar architecture. To explain a little, the below table displays the programs that make up the server side software.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

Program	Directory name in repo	Event-based?
Master	server	No
Simulation Server	worldd	No
Login Server	login-server	Yes
Proxy Server	proxy	Yes
Old database server	db-server	No
World database server	world_db (server_rewrite branch)	Yes

Don't worry about the discrepansies in subproject naming conventions, I do have a plan for them now, believe it or not. It's just that the plan keeps on changing...

For the master server, an architecture change means that the main loop will no longer only run at a fixed rate: it will also be able to respond to events immediately, using blocking event queues. This is achieved with a structure akin to the pseudo-code example below.

Changing the architecture has meant a rather large amount of refactoring, as it affects nearly all systems on the master server. Since this has largely meant a complete rewrite, I have taken to also rewriting some of the systems into a mold I feel is better suited for the future. For example, the world/entity system that's used to control player characters, creatures and other game objects, is being completely written from scratch in the server_rewrite Git branch. The world API contains functions such as the ones below.

Calls such as the ones above are asynchronous in nature, as they involve the simulation server instances connected to the master server. Hence, I've been thinking of reworking them in such a way that they would accept a callback, "on_request_finished" (or whatever). That would be alright for code clarity, but then, that would involve some memory overhead. The alternative is to handle finished requests inside the world API itself, meaning it will have to call back to some other API's that called it. You know, I'm constantly pondering where the line of abstraction should lie: tight coupling isn't pretty, but abstraction often comes at a great programmatic resource cost. In the above case, there's little reason to create a datastructure for saving callbacks and their user data (void pointers) if there's really only one logical path the code can take when a response arrives. I try not to fall down the trap of "OOP" and "design patterns" just for the sake of such silly things, but at the same time, sometimes I have an engineer's urge to overengineer things. Usually I end up with the more practical, less abstraction-based approach. After all, I know every dark corner of my own program, or so I at the very least believe.

The rewrite has taken about two months now and I think it will still take some more time, partly because at the same time I must make changes to other programs in the server side stack as well. At the same time, new programs are coming in, such as the world database server. It will be interesting to see how things will work out when the server starts up again for the first time... Well, maybe frustrating is a more appropriate word.

World database server

The world database server is a new introduction to the server side stack. Previously, MUTA had a "db-server" application, but there was no separation between individual world/shard databases and account databases - now, that separation is coming.

The WDB is an intermediate program in between the MySQL server and the MUTA master server. It's sole purpose is to serve requests by master servers through a binary protocol while caching relevant results. The intention is that this is the de-facto way to access a single shard's database.

There's an asynchoronous API associated with the WDB. It's consists of a set of functions, each one of which performs a specific query. The query functions also take in callbacks as parameters - the callbacks are called when the query completes or fails.

Not much else to say about it right now... It's event-based like the rest of the newer applications on the server side. Will keep working on it!

packetwriter2

Back when the MUTA project was started, Lommi wrote an application called MUTA_Packetwriter for network packet serialization. It compiles C code, structs and serialization functions, from a simple file format where the fields of each network packet are defined.

Lommi's tool has saved us countless of hours of writing arbitrary code and debugging it, but now that he is no longer working on the project, and there are many new packets making their way into the protocol with new applications such as the world database coming, I've deemed it necessary to write a new version of this program.

packetwriter2 will use a new, simpler file format, the ".def" format used in many of MUTA's data files. It will support features I've wanted for a long time, such as arrays of structs and nested structs. I've started writing the parser, and below is an example of the file format.

Along the way, I think the encryption scheme needs a rework, too. Not the basic algorithms behind it (MUTA uses libsodium for that), but the fact that currently, messages are encrypted on a per-message-type basis. Being able to turn encryption on and off in the stream would save bandwith and improve performance, as multiple messages could be encrypted in a single set.

Keepin' busy

Honestly, I've been having a tough time scraping up enough time to work on MUTA after starting my current job. Also, turns out motivating myself is difficult if I don't constantly have something to prove to someone (you know, like progress reports to people you know in real life and stuff). Guess I should go and get one of those productivity self-help books soon.