"The Age of Conan was developed with the latest technologies to be the next generation of massive multi-player online games (MMOG)," said Ole Schreiner, vice president of operations at Funcom. "Funcom needed a Tier 1 CDN provider that could provide the quality, dependability and scalability to support critical game patch update files at all times.

It's been a very long wait for everybody and From here on outwards we can all enjoy ourselves in Hyboria.

Bringing to an end the long wait for fans not only of massively multiplayer online games, but also of Robert E. Howard's classic work, Funcom has announced that Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures has shipped for the PC (technically yesterday).

Funcom's developers regularly update the Age of Conan as the AOC Gold game evolves. These updates are delivered with software patches to the online game via Level 3's CDN and need to be delivered smoothly to not interrupt the participation in the AOC Gold game by hundreds of thousands of Age of Conan Gold players. During the first 60 days of the Age of Conan launch, the Level 3 CDN delivered over 2 petabytes (the equivalent of over 1 million high-quality online movies) of AOC Gold game patch updates to the Age of Conan Gold players. "We are pleased to collaborate with Funcom to deliver the scalable

Although there are significant multiplayer elements in the Tortage area this article will focus as much as possible on the Solo-play ...also known as Tortage: Nightime because of several factors. First, This is a new AOC Gold game and has a LOT of people interested in playing. As such, these levels can become VERY crowded when this AOC Gold game is released as well as every time a new server is released. Competition for resources may be frustrating to some. Second, the play on the PvP servers can be very grueling. Grief is commonplace, as such you will level faster if you spend as much time in the solo-play instances and then leave for the wider more expansive zones you'll find after Tortage.

In 2D, you usually have a frame buffer, which is a big array of pixels. The format of those pixels can differ, from video card to video card. Some have RGB modes, other have BGR modes, etc. The number of bits for each color can differ as well. This happens only for 16bpp video modes. 8-bit and 24-bit video modes are easier, but with their problems (8-bits gives you few colors (256), while 24-bit modes are slower).

A malicious user can send a really long data sequence. If not checked, this will overflow the buffer, resulting in a server crash, or, worse, the user being able to hack your server, executing arbitrary code. Every single message has to be checked: whether buffer overflow occurred, whether invalid data was sent (such as users sending "enter this door" even though the door is at the other end of the map, or "use the healing potion" although the user has no such potions, etc.). I will say it again: It is extremely important to validate all the data. Whenever there is a violation, log it along with the username, IP, time and date, and the nature of the violation.

At least 3 Programmers: 1 for the server, and 2 for the client (or 1 for the client, one for the tools, such as plug-ins for the artists, a world editor, etc.). Having up to 6 programmers is good, more than 6 might be too much. It really depends on your leadership abilities. At the very least 1 artist, but preferably 2 or 3. If it's a 3D game you will need a 3D artist, a 2D artist (textures, interface, etc.), an animator, and an art department leader. Unless you are a good artist, the art department needs to be kept together and coordinated by an experienced artist.

But as the team leader you'll have to do much more than just programming. Keeping the team together, solving conflicts, doing public relations (PR), tech support, setting up servers, banning troublemakers, brainstorming, etc. will be your attributions. So you will be swamped with non-programming tasks as well. Then you will most likely need to go to work/school, which shortens the time you can dedicate to your project.

The fighters will not like the fact that it's too hard to gain levels, while the merchants will be very disappointed that the fighters make too much money from loots. If you decrease the monster drops, some people will threaten to quit the game. If you increase it, the same people will not like the fact that now even beginners can make money easily. Letting it as is, isn't good either.