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Video game "Halo 4" Actor model design and implementation is how, many novices are not very clear about this, in order to help you solve this problem, the following editor will explain in detail for you, people with this need can come to learn, I hope you can gain something.

At the beginning of designing the next generation of Halo video games-Halo 4, the existing game engines and available services can no longer meet the needs of the game, so the developers designed a new solution based on the Actor model and implemented the model using the Orleans framework. In a speech at QCon London, Caitie McCaffrey introduced the audience to the process of designing and creating the services behind the new game.

McCaffrey, who originally worked at Microsoft Game Studio, now works as a distributed systems engineer at Twitter. He mentioned an architectural challenge in the game development process, which is how to design the massive access load that the game will face. On the day Halo 4 was launched, a total of 1 million independent online users participated in the game, which rose to 400 within a week, with a total game time of more than 30 million hours. To cope with such a heavy load, the project chose to be hosted in the cloud, more specifically on Azure. After all, Halo 4 is a game launched by Microsoft. Other challenges include how to ensure that the game is always running online, which requires the server to remain available forever, minimize latency, and improve concurrency.

In the process of finding a solution that can meet the needs of the project, the project team turned its attention to the Actor model. In essence, Actor (role) is the foundation of concurrency, and the core concept of this model is that as the primitive of concurrent computing, each Actor will communicate with another Actor by sending asynchronous messages. When an Actor receives a message, it can choose to send the message to another Actor, create a new Actor, or modify its internal state. In this way, you can efficiently store all the data of an Actor in the same place, so McCaffrey and his team have created a set of middle tiers that can maintain state by implementing these stateful services, which has the high performance advantages of caching on the one hand and does not cause problems caused by concurrency on the other.

The project team looked around for viable solutions within Microsoft and finally found the Orleans framework, a runtime and programming model for creating distributed systems based on the Actor model. The most important difference between the Orleans framework and other Actor model frameworks is its unique concept: virtual Actor. This virtual Actor is never created or destroyed, and logically it exists forever. The key idea of virtual Actor is address transparency, that is, messages sent to an Actor will be automatically routed to the Actor, no matter where the Actor address is; second, it can scale out automatically without redeployment.

McCaffrey claims that in a new architecture that uses new technologies, the server's CPU utilization can remain stable at 90%, achieve near-linear scalability, and can easily cope with load variables, which is useful in times of sudden traffic growth, such as when the game is just launched.

McCaffrey believes that without the framework of Orleans, the Halo 4 project would not have been successful. Because Orleans can be a great help for developers to write code that runs in a distributed environment, it is much easier to find the right developers. And because it improves developer productivity, developers can focus on improving the game's user experience and making it perform better.

In an earlier blog post, McCaffrey introduced the process of using Orleans to create RESTful services.

InfoQ has previously specifically discussed and reported on different ways to implement the Actor model.

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