The entrance to PAX 08 had an impressive display of Jumpgate Evolution, a new MMO space combat game made by Codemasters Online and NetDevil. The moment I saw it, I couldn’t help but to compare it to Eve Online. It was hard not to, as it is an MMO game with spaceships.

Of course, no one can copyright the MMO space game and Jumpgate Evolution has one great aspect that sets it apart from Eve: Jumpgate Evolution skips through much of the boring set-up involved in most MMO games and puts you right into the action.

When I sat down and began playing, I was on a mission to…

With the increasing popularity of MMOGs (Massive Multiplayer Online Games) and the growing user community, the technologies behind them have to evolve in order to accommodate hordes of players living and interacting in a virtual world. As hundreds of thousands of users conduct raids and battles, powerful computer clusters have to keep track of every move and action users make. As the users keep on coming, companies have to figure out ways of keeping these worlds running smoothly.

While different companies employ different architectures to simulate these virtual environments, all of them are working to develop a solution in which all the players could really share a single virtual world. In case of the popular World of Warcraft, Blizzard uses what they call “shards,” which are copies of the same world running in different machines. Users of WOW, which now total over 9 million, are distributed amongst these shards to…