I am thinking beyond the scale of any given machine and traditional game engine architectures.
I am thinking of an entire datacenter purpose-built to host a single game world, with edge locations handling the last mile of client-side prediction, viewport rendering, streaming and batching of input events.
We already have a lot of the conceptual architecture figured out in places like the NYSE and CBOE - Processing hundreds of millions of events in less than a second on a single CPU core against one synchronous view of some world. We can do this with insane reliability and precision day after day. Many of the technology requirements that emerge from the single instance WoW path approximate what we have already accomplished in other domains.
EVE online is more or less the closest to this so far, so it may be worth learning lessons from them (though I wouldn't suggest copying their approach: their stackless python behemoth codebase appears to contain many a horror). It's certainly a hard problem though, especially when you have a concentration of large numbers of players (which is inevitable when you create such a game world).
The question though is how you make something that complex and not have it be a horror though, and is stackless python really the culprit of the horror vs anything else they could have built it in.
I am thinking of an entire datacenter purpose-built to host a single game world, with edge locations handling the last mile of client-side prediction, viewport rendering, streaming and batching of input events.
We already have a lot of the conceptual architecture figured out in places like the NYSE and CBOE - Processing hundreds of millions of events in less than a second on a single CPU core against one synchronous view of some world. We can do this with insane reliability and precision day after day. Many of the technology requirements that emerge from the single instance WoW path approximate what we have already accomplished in other domains.