Bigworld

BigWorld

Type	Subsidiary
Industry	Video games
Founded	Sydney, Australia (2002)
Headquarters	Sydney, Australia
Key people	Steve Wang (CEO) Simon Hayes (CTO)
Number of employees	~65 (2013)
Parent	Wargaming.net
Website	www.bigworldtech.com

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

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.

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 (occlusion culling), Scaleform (user interface creation), Speedtree (foliage ), and Vivox (VOIP).

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).

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.