Type Subsidiary Number of employees ~65 (2013) Headquarters Sydney, Australia Founded 1999, Sydney, Australia | Industry Video games Website www.bigworldtech.com Founder John De Margheriti Parent organizations Wargaming, Wargaming.net | |
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Key people Steve Wang (CEO)
Simon Hayes (CTO) | ||
BigWorld is an Australian company formed in 2002 that develops and licenses a middleware development tool suite for the creation of massively multiplayer online games (MMO) and virtual worlds. In 2007, BigWorld was recognized as the industry leader in UK's Develop magazine
Contents
- Technical Overview
- Games
- List of Games Built on BigWorld Technology
- Server Load Balancing
- Licenses
- Guinness Record
- Awards
- References
On 7 August 2012, Wargaming.net acquired BigWorld middleware firm for $45M.
By a statement of the Development in January 2015, BigWorld stopped the development and support of the Indie Edition.
Technical Overview
BigWorld Technology provides an underlying software architecture needed for game developers to build MMO's and online games. The 3D client technology is built for Windows PC and browser, and is available on iOS, Xbox360 and PlayStation 3 via network API. The back-end server solution is implemented under Linux, with a Python API scripting environment. The tool suite includes content creation tools, server monitoring tools and support. BigWorld Technology also integrates various 3rd party plugins such as Umbra (Occlusion Culling), Scaleform (User Interface Creation), Speedtree (Foliage), and Vivox (VOIP).
Games
Published games using BigWorld Technology include World of Tanks (Wargaming.net), Realm of the Titans (Aeria Games), VIE: Virtual Island of Entertainment (enVie Interactive LLC), Hokuto no ken ONLINE (GungHo Online Entertainment), (Meteor Games), Moego (Userjoy), World of Warplanes (Wargaming.net), and Secret Kingdoms Online (Globex Studios). Games currently being built on BigWorld include World of Warships (Wargaming.net), and Tian Xia III (Netease).
List of Games Built on BigWorld Technology
Server Load Balancing
BigWorld Server supports dynamic load balancing, a feature that automatically and dynamically spreads user load across multiple cell apps on the same game server, allowing for large numbers of concurrent users to inhabit the same game space. In 1999, BigWorld ran a test, simulating 900 entities on the same server. In 2005, large scale tests were carried out at the IBM Deep Computing facility in Poughkeepsie, NY. BigWorld successfully demonstrated the linear scalability of its load balancing technology by dynamically balancing 100,000 entities across various cell apps on a single server.
Licenses
BigWorld Technology is offered in the following licenses:
Guinness Record
World of Tanks is built on BigWorld Technology. On 23 January 2011, Guinness stated that the World of Tanks Russian server broke the previous record for Most Players Online Simultaneously on One MMO Server when they reached 91,311 concurrent users. In November 2011 World of Tanks reached a new concurrency level of 250,000 players.
Awards
BigWorld Technology has received a number of business and technology innovation related awards: