What is NeL

NeL is a toolkit for the development of massively online universes. It provides the base technologies and a set of development methodologies for the development of both client and server code.

Development philosophy

NeL is not a complete black box solution for absolutely any game that can be imagined.

Nevrax believe that any cutting edge interactive entertainment product needs a technology platform that is tuned to its specific requirements. NeL is intended to be considered as a library of components that can be added to, adapted or extended to meet the specific requirements of the products that are based on it.

It is clear that 'look alike' products that use the complete set or a sub-set of the features for an existing NeL product may get away with no extra technology development work at all.

Any technology developed for new NeL-based products should be fed back into NeL to allow the library to evolve and to stay at the leading edge.

The NeL development teams at Nevrax work closely with the internal product development teams to ensure that the solutions provided by NeL are perfectly adapted to the requirements of the product. In a nutshell this product contains animated characters walking around and interacting with each other in indoor and outdoor environments. The feature list below corresponds to the requirements of this type of product.

NeL MMORPG architecture

The NeL solution is designed around a typical client/ server setup with the following physical machines:

• Login server
  Manages user login and password authentication and negotiates with shards for connection points for clients.
• Shard administration servers
  Server that communicate, by secure means, with the different servers of the different shards that are up.

• Client PC
  Has client software & data installed

The servers at each site are organised into sets that each manage simulate a single complete instance of a virtual univers. These groups arerefered to as shards. Each shard has the following servers on its own dedicated LAN :

• Front end servers
  A number of servers that manage player connections
• Back end servers
  One or more servers that manage the game world and AI.
  The back end software comprises a set of executables called 'services'. The list of services required to run a shard back end is product dependent. Any number of services can run on each back end server.