BigWorld


BigWorld is an Australian company formed in 2002 by John De Margheriti that develops and licenses a middleware development tool suite for the creation of massively multiplayer online games and virtual worlds. It was the first company that developed such a middleware platform for the MMO market. In 2007, BigWorld was recognized as the industry leader in UK's Develop magazine. On 7 August 2012, Wargaming acquired BigWorld middleware firm for $45M.

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, Xbox 360 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 third party plugins such as Umbra, Scaleform, Speedtree, and Vivox.

Games

Published games using BigWorld Technology include World of Tanks, World of Warplanes, World of Warships, Realm of the Titans, , Hokuto no ken ONLINE,, Moego, Tian Xia III and Secret Kingdoms Online.

List of games made with BigWorld technology

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:
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: