Age of Ascent - An epic space game on Microsoft Azure

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Earlier this year I, along with other members of the Microsoft TED team and the UK Microsoft Technology Center, helped Illyriad, a small UK games company, design and start building “Age of Ascent” a massively multiplayer online epic space game, powered by Microsoft Azure.

John Shewchuck in his recent blog post “Building a massively-multiplayer game on Microsoft Azure”, describes the story and gives an overview of the game and how it was designed.

The MSDN paper “Age of Ascent - An epic space game on Microsoft Azure”, which I helped author, provides a more detailed insight into the game’s design and architecture, and some of the rational behind those decisions, along with some of the lessons learnt on route.

If you are interested in the cloud then you should find it a fascinating read into the architectural decisions and development work that was undertaken to create such a massive, geo-scalable system. It also neatly demonstrates how the cloud can change the rules about just what is possible.

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