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A distributed architecture for MMORPG

by Marios Assiotis, Velin Tzanov - In Proceedings ACM NetGames ’06 , 2006
"... We present an approach to support Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games. Our proposed solution begins by splitting the large virtual world into smaller regions, each region handled by a different server. We present techniques and algorithms that (1) reduce the bandwidth requirements for bo ..."
Abstract - Cited by 22 (0 self) - Add to MetaCart
We present an approach to support Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games. Our proposed solution begins by splitting the large virtual world into smaller regions, each region handled by a different server. We present techniques and algorithms that (1) reduce the bandwidth requirements for both game servers and clients, (2) address consistency, hotspot, congestion and server failure problems typically found in MMORPG and (3) allow seamless interaction be-tween players residing on areas handled by different servers. By implementing a simple game, Kosmos, we show the appli-cability of our approach as well as the relative performance benefits of designing new games using our architecture.
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A Distributed Event Delivery Method with Load Balancing for MMORPG

by Shinya Yamamoto, Yoshihiro Murata, Keiichi Yasumoto, Minoru Ito - In Proceedings of the 4th NetGames workshop , 2005
"... In this paper, we propose a new distributed event delivery method for MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games). In our method, the whole game space is divided into multiple sub spaces with the same size and some player nodes are selected as responsible nodes to deliver game events oc ..."
Abstract - Cited by 22 (1 self) - Add to MetaCart
In this paper, we propose a new distributed event delivery method for MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games). In our method, the whole game space is divided into multiple sub spaces with the same size and some player nodes are selected as responsible nodes to deliver game events occurring in their responsible sub spaces. Our method includes (1) a load balancing mechanism which allows each responsible node for the crowded sub space to dynamically construct a tree of multiple nodes and deliver events along the tree to reduce event forwarding overhead per node, (2) a technique to reduce end-to-end event delivery delay by dynamically replacing nodes in the tree, and (3) a technique to efficiently and seamlessly switch sub spaces to be observed while each player’s view moves around in the game space. Through experiments, we show that our method achieves practical performance for MMORPG.
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Challenges in peer-to-peer gaming

by Christoph Neumann, Nicolas Prigent, Matteo Varvello, Kyoungwon Suh - ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
"... This article is an editorial note submitted to CCR. It has NOT been peer reviewed. Authors take full responsibility for this article’s technical content. Comments can be posted through CCR Online. While multi-player online games are very successful, their fast deployment suffers from their server-ba ..."
Abstract - Cited by 17 (0 self) - Add to MetaCart
This article is an editorial note submitted to CCR. It has NOT been peer reviewed. Authors take full responsibility for this article’s technical content. Comments can be posted through CCR Online. While multi-player online games are very successful, their fast deployment suffers from their server-based architecture. Indeed, servers both limit the scalability of the games and increase deployment costs. However, they make it easier to control the game (e.g. by preventing cheating and providing support for billing). Peer-to-peer, i.e. transfer of the game functions on each each player’s machine, is an attractive communication model for online gaming. We investigate here the challenges of peer-to-peer gaming, hoping that this discussion will generate a broader interest in the research community.
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pSense - Maintaining a Dynamic Localized Peer-to-Peer Structure for Position Based Multicast in Games

by Arne Schmieg, Patric Kabus, Michael Stieler, Bettina Kemme, Sebastian Jeckel, Alejandro Buchmann - In Proc. of P2P , 2008
"... This paper presents an algorithm for creating and maintaining a dynamic localized peer-to-peer overlay network with its main application to massively multiplayer games. In these games, players reside in a large game world with many thousands of players but each player has typically a limited vision ..."
Abstract - Cited by 17 (2 self) - Add to MetaCart
This paper presents an algorithm for creating and maintaining a dynamic localized peer-to-peer overlay network with its main application to massively multiplayer games. In these games, players reside in a large game world with many thousands of players but each player has typically a limited vision range. In our solution, players join the network as peers and mainly connect to neighbor peers that are close to them in the virtual game world. As players move in the game they change their neighbors dynamically with very little overhead. Peers can multicast messages that are received by peers in their locality very fast (often faster than in client-server solutions) while players that are further away receive them later or not at all. Not receiving messages from remote players is important in order to not cause the load on each peer to grow with the number of players in the game. Our performance analysis confirms that our solution allows for dynamic game worlds of practically unlimited size, only limited in scale by the number of players within the vision range. 1.
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Hydra: A Massively-Multiplayer Peer-to-Peer Architecture for the Game Developer

by Luther Chan, James Yong, Jiaqiang Bai, Ben Leong, Raymond Tan - NETGAMES'07 , 2007
"... We present the design and implementation of Hydra, a peer-to-peer architecture for massively-multiplayer online games. By supporting a novel augmented server-client programming model with a protocol that guarantees consistency in the messages committed when nodes fail, existing game developers can r ..."
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We present the design and implementation of Hydra, a peer-to-peer architecture for massively-multiplayer online games. By supporting a novel augmented server-client programming model with a protocol that guarantees consistency in the messages committed when nodes fail, existing game developers can realize the benefits of a peer-to-peer architecture without the burden of handling the complexities associated with network churn. Our key contribution is the development of a programming interface that is intuitive and easy to use, and that can be supported transparently at the network layer. We have implemented a prototype of Hydra and we demonstrate that our proposed architecture is practical by developing two games under the Hydra framework: a simple “capture the flag” tank game and a squad-based real-time strategy (RTS) game. Our experience in developing these games suggests that our proposed programming model is suitable for game development. Our preliminary experiments also show that Hydra imposes only a small message overhead and is thus scalable.
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A dynamic area of interest management and collaboration model for P2P MMOGs

by Dewan Tanvir Ahmed, Shervin Shirmohammadi - in IEEE International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real Time Applications , 2008
"... In this paper, we present a dynamic area of interest management for Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG). Instead of mapping the virtual space to the area of interest (AOI), we scheme AOIs to the virtual space. This zoneless MMOG is the consequence of dynamic AOIs that redeems the necessity of ..."
Abstract - Cited by 14 (2 self) - Add to MetaCart
In this paper, we present a dynamic area of interest management for Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG). Instead of mapping the virtual space to the area of interest (AOI), we scheme AOIs to the virtual space. This zoneless MMOG is the consequence of dynamic AOIs that redeems the necessity of inter-AOI communication. In addition, the AOI maintenance cost is reduced significantly by assigning the maintenance responsibility to a subset of players for each AOI. Due to the integration of peer-to-peer communication model to the system, the scalability has improved. To satisfy the timing constraints, the projection of the underling network topology to the overlay network is more fruitful than building the overlay on the fly unintelligently. In response to this fact, the proposed communication model adapts the gift wrapping algorithm which is usually used for minimax problem. The model is evaluated and justified through proper simulation. 1.
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Applicability of group communication for increased scalability in MMOGs

by Knut-helge Vik - In NetGames , 2006
"... Massive multiplayer online games (MMOGs) are today the driving factor for the development of distributed interactive applications, and they are increasing in size and complexity. Even a small MMOG supports thousands of players, the biggest support hundreds of thousands of concurrent players. Since t ..."
Abstract - Cited by 9 (6 self) - Add to MetaCart
Massive multiplayer online games (MMOGs) are today the driving factor for the development of distributed interactive applications, and they are increasing in size and complexity. Even a small MMOG supports thousands of players, the biggest support hundreds of thousands of concurrent players. Since they are typically built as strict client-server systems, they suffer from the inherent scalability problem of the architecture. Computing power and bandwidth limitations close to the server limit the possible number of players. Also, the latency of communication between players through the server will be higher than using direct communication. In the paper, we address these issues and investigate improvement options. A typical MMOG consists of a virtual world with a concept of time and space that is similar to the real world. In it, players are represented by avatars. Only subsets of these avatars interact with each other at any given time. This allows us to divide them into groups, and communication among group members becomes a multi-party communication problem. Thus, to reduce resource consumption, we compare the performance of several algorithms for group communication with the current central server approach. We use overlay multicast as the means of providing group communication, and research algorithms for creating shortest path trees, spanning trees, delay-bounded spanning trees and, more specific, applying Steiner tree heuristics. Our experimental results indicate that different approaches are useful to reduce resource consumption while achieving a good perceived quality under varying conditions, such as frequent changes in group membership and the demand for low latency. 1.
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Design Issues for Peer-to-Peer Massively Multiplayer Online Games

by Lu Fan, Phil Trinder, Hamish Taylor
"... increasing in both popularity and scale, and while classical Client/Server architectures convey some benefits, they suffer from significant technical and commercial drawbacks. This realisation has sparked intensive research interest in adapting MMOGs to Peer-to-Peer (P2P) architectures. This paper a ..."
Abstract - Cited by 9 (0 self) - Add to MetaCart
increasing in both popularity and scale, and while classical Client/Server architectures convey some benefits, they suffer from significant technical and commercial drawbacks. This realisation has sparked intensive research interest in adapting MMOGs to Peer-to-Peer (P2P) architectures. This paper articulates a comprehensive set of six design issues to be addressed by P2P MMOGs, namely interest management, game event dissemination, NPC host allocation, game state persistency, cheating mitigation, and incentive mechanisms. Design alternatives for each issue are systematically compared, and their interrelationships discussed. We further evaluate how well representative P2P MMOG architectures fulfil the design criteria.
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Persistence in massively multiplayer online games

by Kaiwen Zhang, Bettina Kemme, Alexandre Denault - In NetGames ’08, pages 1 – 10 , 2008
"... The most important asset of a Massively Multiplayer Online Game is its world state, as it represents the combined efforts and progress of all its participants. Thus, it is extremely important that this state is not lost in case of server failures. Survival of the world state is typically achieved by ..."
Abstract - Cited by 8 (2 self) - Add to MetaCart
The most important asset of a Massively Multiplayer Online Game is its world state, as it represents the combined efforts and progress of all its participants. Thus, it is extremely important that this state is not lost in case of server failures. Survival of the world state is typically achieved by making it persistent, e.g., by storing it in a relational database. The main challenge of this approach is to track the large volume of modifications applied to the world in real time. This paper compares a variety of strategies to persist changes of the game world. While critical events must be written synchronously to the persistent storage, a set of approximation strategies are discussed and compared that are suitable for events with low consistency requirements, such as player movements. An analysis to better understand the possible limitations and bottlenecks of these strategies is presented using experimental data from an MMOG research framework. Our analysis shows that a distance-based solution offers the scalability and efficiency required for large-scale games as well as offering error bounds and eliminating unnecessary updates associated with localized movement. 1.
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Efficient triangulation for P2P networked virtual environments

by Eliya Buyukkaya, Maha Abdallah - in Proc. 7th ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Network and System Support for Games , 2008
"... Abstract Peer-to-peer (P2P) architectures have recently become a popular design choice for building scalable Networked Virtual Environments (NVEs). In P2P-based NVEs, system and data management is distributed among all participating users. Towards this end, a Delaunay Triangulation can be used to pr ..."
Abstract - Cited by 8 (1 self) - Add to MetaCart
Abstract Peer-to-peer (P2P) architectures have recently become a popular design choice for building scalable Networked Virtual Environments (NVEs). In P2P-based NVEs, system and data management is distributed among all participating users. Towards this end, a Delaunay Triangulation can be used to provide connectivity between the different NVE users depending on their positions in the virtual world. However, a Delaunay Triangulation clearly suffers from high maintenance cost as it is subject to high connection change rate due to continuous users ' movement. In this paper, we propose a new triangulation algorithm that provides network connectivity to support P2P NVEs while dramatically decreasing maintenance overhead by reducing the number of connection changes due to users' insertion and movement. Performance evaluations show that our solution drastically reduces overlay maintenance cost in highly dynamic NVEs. More importantly, and beyond its quantitative advantages, this work questions the well accepted Delaunay Triangulation as a reference means for providing connectivity in NVEs, and paves the way for more research towards more practical alternatives for NVE applications.
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