The first online computer game designed to accommodate a million simultaneous players will be previewed on Friday.

The game, called Rekonstruction, is not scheduled for commercial release until autumn 2004. But some of the challenges involved with building it will be revealed at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in Santa Clara, California.

Creating a large virtual world that does not repeat itself is very time consuming and hence expensive, says Chris DiBona of Damage Studios, the company behind the game. The large multiplayer games currently online usually take one world and then repeat it. For example, the game Everquest supports 450,000 users, but is split into 32 segregated segments.

In contrast, Rekonstruction will aim to provide up to a million users with a single unique world. To try to overcome the problem of creating the vast amount of unique content needed, automated programs will be employed to generate the virtual world with a minimum of intervention from human programmers.

Furthermore, the players themselves will generate new content by reconstructing their world - the game is set 400 years into the future after a catastrophic asteroid strike devastates Earth.

Some online games have begun to blur the line between gameplay and reality. In Everquest, some virtual items can be bought and sold for real money through trading sites like eBay. DiBona thinks the scale of Rekonstruction could increase this phenomenon.

Andy Phelps, an expert in computer game design at the Rochester Institute of Technology, New York, says the game is technologically possible. But he thinks the unprecedented scale could present unforeseen problems. "It will dwarf the scale of what we've had up until now," he says.


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