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Peer-to-Peer Support for Massively Multiplayer Games
, 2004
"... We present an approach to support massively multi-player games on peer-to-peer overlays. Our approach exploits the fact that players in MMGs display locality of interest, and therefore can form self-organizing groups based on their locations in the virtual world. To this end, we have designed scalab ..."
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Cited by 244 (2 self)
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We present an approach to support massively multi-player games on peer-to-peer overlays. Our approach exploits the fact that players in MMGs display locality of interest, and therefore can form self-organizing groups based on their locations in the virtual world. To this end, we have designed scalable mechanisms to distribute the game state to the participating players and to maintain consistency in the face of node failures. The resulting system dynamically scales with the number of online players. It is more flexible and has a lower deployment cost than centralized games servers. We have implemented a simple game we call SimMud, and experimented with up to 4000 players to demonstrate the applicability of this approach.
The effects of loss and latency on user performance in unreal tournament 2003
- in NETGAMES, 2004
"... The growth in the popularity of interactive network games has increased the importance of a better understanding of the effects of packet loss and latency on user performance. While previous work on network games has studied user tolerance for high latencies and has studied the effects of latency on ..."
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Cited by 74 (5 self)
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The growth in the popularity of interactive network games has increased the importance of a better understanding of the effects of packet loss and latency on user performance. While previous work on network games has studied user tolerance for high latencies and has studied the effects of latency on user performance in real-time strategy games, to the best of our knowledge, there has been no systematic study of the effects of loss and latency on user performance. In this paper we study user performance for Unreal Tournament 2003 (UT2003), a popular first person shooter game, under varying amounts of packet loss and latency. First, we deduced typical real world values of packet loss and latency experienced on the Internet by monitoring numerous operational UT2003 game servers. We then used these deduced values of loss and latency in a controlled networked environment that emulated various conditions of loss and latency, allowing us to monitor UT2003 at the network, application and user levels. We designed maps that isolated the fundamental first person shooter interaction components of movement and shooting, and conducted numerous user studies under controlled network conditions. We find that typical ranges of packet loss have no impact on user performance or on the quality of game play. The levels of latency typical for most UT2003 Internet servers, while sometimes unpleasant, do not significantly affect the outcome of the game. Since most first person shooter games typically consist of generic player actions similar to those that we tested, we believe that these results have broader implications.
Objective and Subjective Evaluation of the Influence of Small Amounts of Delay and Jitter on a Recent First Person Shooter Game
- In Proc. 3rd Workshop on Network and System Support for Games (NETGAMES
, 2004
"... There have been several studies in the past years that investigate the impact of network delay on multi-user applications. Primary examples of these applications are real-time multiplayer games. These studies have shown that high network delays and jitter may indeed influence the player’s perception ..."
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Cited by 32 (1 self)
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There have been several studies in the past years that investigate the impact of network delay on multi-user applications. Primary examples of these applications are real-time multiplayer games. These studies have shown that high network delays and jitter may indeed influence the player’s perception of the quality of the game. However, the proposed test values, which are often high, are not always representative for a large percentile of on-line game players. We have therefore investigated the influence of delay and jitter with numbers that are more representative for typical access networks. This in effect allows us to simulate a setup with multiplayer game servers that are located at ISP level and players connected through that ISP’s access network. To obtain further true-to-life results, we opted to carry out the test using a recent first person shooter (FPS) game, Unreal Tournament 2003. It can, after all, be expected that this new generation of games has built-in features to diminish the effect of small delay values, given the popularity of playing these games over the Internet. In this paper, we have investigated both subjective perceived quality and objective measurements and will show that both are indeed influenced by even these small delay and jitter values.
On the Sensitivity of Online Game Playing Time to Network QoS
"... Abstract — Online gaming is one of the most profitable businesses on the Internet. Among various threats to continuous player subscriptions, network lags are particularly notorious. It is widely known that frequent and long lags frustrate game players, but whether the players actually take action an ..."
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Cited by 27 (11 self)
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Abstract — Online gaming is one of the most profitable businesses on the Internet. Among various threats to continuous player subscriptions, network lags are particularly notorious. It is widely known that frequent and long lags frustrate game players, but whether the players actually take action and leave a game is unclear. Motivated to answer this question, we apply survival analysis to a 1, 356-million-packet trace from a sizeable MMORPG, called ShenZhou Online. We find that both network delay and network loss significantly affect a player’s willingness to continue a game. For ShenZhou Online, the degrees of player “intolerance ” of minimum RTT, RTT jitter, client loss rate, and server loss rate are in the proportion of 1:2:11:6. This indicates that 1) while many network games provide “ping time, ” i.e., the RTT, to players to facilitate server selection, it would be more useful to provide information about delay jitters; and 2) players are much less tolerant of network loss than delay. This is due to the game designer’s decision to transfer data in TCP, where packet loss not only results in additional packet delays due to in-order delivery and retransmission, but also a lower sending rate.
Interactivity-Loss Avoidance in Event Delivery Synchronization for Mirrored Game Architectures
- IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MULTIMEDIA
, 2005
"... Since the expansion of their market and their challenging requirements, Massively Multiplayer Online Games are gaining increasing attention in the scientific community. One of the key factors in this kind of application is represented by the ability to rapidly deliver game events among the various p ..."
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Cited by 23 (19 self)
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Since the expansion of their market and their challenging requirements, Massively Multiplayer Online Games are gaining increasing attention in the scientific community. One of the key factors in this kind of application is represented by the ability to rapidly deliver game events among the various players over the network. Employing in this context Mirrored Game Server architecture and adapting RED (Random Early Detection) techniques borrowed from network queuing management, we are able to show sensible benefits in upholding interactivity and scalability, whilst preserving game state consistency and game evolution fluency at the player's side.
A RIO-like Technique for Interactivity Loss Avoidance In Fast-Paced Multiplayer Online Games: a Preliminary Study
- Online Games”, ACM Journal of Computers in Entertainment, ACM Press
, 2004
"... The astonishing increase of the Internet diffusion has provided global connectivity proficient at deploying online games for a large number of participants located even very far from each other. However, online games are characterized by more stringent requirements than those accomplishable by tradi ..."
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Cited by 15 (10 self)
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The astonishing increase of the Internet diffusion has provided global connectivity proficient at deploying online games for a large number of participants located even very far from each other. However, online games are characterized by more stringent requirements than those accomplishable by traditional distributed applications deployed over best-effort networks. Indeed, one of the key factors in determining the success of an online game is represented by the ability to rapidly deliver events among the various game servers that maintain the state of the game over the network. We already demonstrated that adapting in this context RED (Random Early Detection) techniques borrowed from queuing management can improve the global responsiveness of the game [1]. However, this solution may be not sufficient for a specific class of on-line games. We deem that, in case of fast-paced multiplayer online games (such as shoot 'em up, for example) requiring a frenetic behavior of the participants, a highly elevate interactivity degree must be guaranteed even at the cost of partially sacrificing the consistency of the game state. In this case, in fact, having only a partial consistency view of the game state is not so player's amusement affecting as, instead, a delayed action processing activity may be. We have hence explored the possibility to apply a RIO (RED with In and Out) based algorithm to manage the game state delivery among the various game servers, in order to further improve the aptitude of our scheme in maintaining a highly playable interactivity degree for fast-paced online games. Preliminary experimental results confirm the viability of our approach.
Measurement and Estimation of Network QoS Among Peer Xbox 360 Game Players
- in PAM, ser. Lecture Notes in Computer Science
, 2008
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Network Characteristics for Server Selection in Online Games
"... Online gameplay is impacted by the network characteristics of players connected to the same server. Unfortunately, the network characteristics of online game servers are not well-understood, particularly for groups that wish to play together on the same server. As a step towards a remedy, this paper ..."
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Cited by 11 (0 self)
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Online gameplay is impacted by the network characteristics of players connected to the same server. Unfortunately, the network characteristics of online game servers are not well-understood, particularly for groups that wish to play together on the same server. As a step towards a remedy, this paper presents analysis of an extensive set of measurements of game servers on the Internet. Over the course of many months, actual Internet game servers were queried simultaneously by twenty-five emulated game clients, with both servers and clients spread out on the Internet. The data provides statistics on the uptime and populations of game servers over a month long period an an in-depth look at the suitability for game servers for multi-player server selection, concentrating on characteristics critical to playability – latency and fairness. Analysis finds most game servers have latencies suitable for third-person and omnipresent games, such as real-time strategy, sports and role-playing games, providing numerous server choices for game players. However, far fewer game servers have the low latencies required for first-person games, such as shooters or race games. In all cases, groups that wish to play together have a greatly reduced set of servers from which to choose because of inherent unfairness in server latencies and server selection is particularly limited as the group size increases. These results hold across different game types and even across different generations of games. The data should be useful for game developers and network researchers that seek to improve game server selection, whether for single or multiple players. 1.
FILA in Gameland, a Holistic Approach to a Problem of Many Dimensions
- in ACM Journal of Computer in Entertainment, ACM Press
, 2006
"... Multiplayer online games have now become popular with millions across the globe, capturing the attention of both researchers and practitioners. Unfortunately, online games still have to deal with the limitations imposed by some unresolved issues. Interactivity, consistency, fairness, and scalability ..."
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Cited by 6 (3 self)
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Multiplayer online games have now become popular with millions across the globe, capturing the attention of both researchers and practitioners. Unfortunately, online games still have to deal with the limitations imposed by some unresolved issues. Interactivity, consistency, fairness, and scalability are the major requirements that need to be addressed efficiently in order to provide an appealing product to a huge number of potential customers worldwide. To answer this demand, we describe a holistic approach that can exploit the semantics of the game to satisfy the aforementioned requirements. We provide extensive and comparative results that demonstrate how our scheme copes efficiently with an elevated level of game traffic.
An Optimistic Obsolescence-Based Approach To Event Synchronization For Massive Multiplayer Online Games
- in International Journal of Computers and Applications, ACTA Press
, 2006
"... Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) are no longer a chimera. Day after day, new exemplars of this application are released, available for free on the Web or on sale. Yet, high lags frequently affect MMOGs annoying customers. This frustrating phenomenon is mainly due to the best-effort service ..."
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Cited by 6 (3 self)
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Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) are no longer a chimera. Day after day, new exemplars of this application are released, available for free on the Web or on sale. Yet, high lags frequently affect MMOGs annoying customers. This frustrating phenomenon is mainly due to the best-effort service provided by the Internet that is often responsible for congestion and loss of responsiveness. To address this challenging issue, we consider a mirrored game server architecture and present a mechanism aimed at accelerating the delivery of game events generated during game sessions. Our approach rests upon the use of an optimistic synchronization mechanism that exploits the semantics of the game to diminish the delivery time of game events, whilst maintaining the full consistency of the game state. Experimental results are reported confirming the adequacy of our approach.
