3,259 research outputs found
A Reusable Component for Communication and Data Synchronization in Mobile Distributed Interactive Applications
In Distributed Interactive Applications (DIA) such as multiplayer games,
where many participants are involved in a same game session and communicate
through a network, they may have an inconsistent view of the virtual world
because of the communication delays across the network. This issue becomes even
more challenging when communicating through a cellular network while executing
the DIA client on a mobile terminal. Consistency maintenance algorithms may be
used to obtain a uniform view of the virtual world. These algorithms are very
complex and hard to program and therefore, the implementation and the future
evolution of the application logic code become difficult. To solve this
problem, we propose an approach where the consistency concerns are handled
separately by a distributed component called a Synchronization Medium, which is
responsible for the communication management as well as the consistency
maintenance. We present the detailed architecture of the Synchronization Medium
and the generic interfaces it offers to DIAs. We evaluate our approach both
qualitatively and quantitatively. We first demonstrate that the Synchronization
Medium is a reusable component through the development of two game
applications, a car racing game and a space war game. A performance evaluation
then shows that the overhead introduced by the Synchronization Medium remains
acceptable.Comment: In Proceedings WCSI 2010, arXiv:1010.233
Mobile Online Gaming via Resource Sharing
Mobile gaming presents a number of main issues which remain open. These are
concerned mainly with connectivity, computational capacities, memory and
battery constraints. In this paper, we discuss the design of a fully
distributed approach for the support of mobile Multiplayer Online Games (MOGs).
In mobile environments, several features might be exploited to enable resource
sharing among multiple devices / game consoles owned by different mobile users.
We show the advantages of trading computing / networking facilities among
mobile players. This operation mode opens a wide number of interesting sharing
scenarios, thus promoting the deployment of novel mobile online games. In
particular, once mobile nodes make their resource available for the community,
it becomes possible to distribute the software modules that compose the game
engine. This allows to distribute the workload for the game advancement
management. We claim that resource sharing is in unison with the idea of ludic
activity that is behind MOGs. Hence, such schemes can be profitably employed in
these contexts.Comment: Proceedings of 3nd ICST/CREATE-NET Workshop on DIstributed SImulation
and Online gaming (DISIO 2012). In conjunction with SIMUTools 2012.
Desenzano, Italy, March 2012. ISBN: 978-1-936968-47-
Cloud for Gaming
Cloud for Gaming refers to the use of cloud computing technologies to build
large-scale gaming infrastructures, with the goal of improving scalability and
responsiveness, improve the user's experience and enable new business models.Comment: Encyclopedia of Computer Graphics and Games. Newton Lee (Editor).
Springer International Publishing, 2015, ISBN 978-3-319-08234-
Peer-to-peer network architecture for massive online gaming
A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Science, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science. Johannesburg, 2014.Virtual worlds and massive multiplayer online games are amongst the most popular applications on the
Internet. In order to host these applications a reliable architecture is required. It is essential for the
architecture to handle high user loads, maintain a complex game state, promptly respond to game interactions,
and prevent cheating, amongst other properties. Many of today’s Massive Multiplayer Online
Games (MMOG) use client-server architectures to provide multiplayer service. Clients (players) send
their actions to a server. The latter calculates the game state and publishes the information to the clients.
Although the client-server architecture has been widely adopted in the past for MMOG, it suffers from
many limitations. First, applications based on a client-server architecture are difficult to support and
maintain given the dynamic user base of online games. Such architectures do not easily scale (or handle
heavy loads). Also, the server constitutes a single point of failure. We argue that peer-to-peer architectures
can provide better support for MMOG. Peer-to-peer architectures can enable the user base to scale
to a large number. They also limit disruptions experienced by players due to other nodes failing.
This research designs and implements a peer-to-peer architecture for MMOG. The peer-to-peer architecture
aims at reducing message latency over the network and on the application layer. We refine the
communication between nodes in the architecture to reduce network latency by using SPDY, a protocol
designed to reduce web page load time. For the application layer, an event-driven paradigm was used to
process messages. Through user load simulation, we show that our peer-to-peer design is able to process
and reliably deliver messages in a timely manner. Furthermore, by distributing the work conducted by a
game server, our research shows that a peer-to-peer architecture responds quicker to requests compared
to client-server models
Re-engineering jake2 to work on a grid using the GridGain Middleware
With the advent of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), engineers and
designers of games came across with many questions that needed to be answered such
as, for example, "how to allow a large amount of clients to play simultaneously on the
same server?", "how to guarantee a good quality of service (QoS) to a great number
of clients?", "how many resources will be necessary?", "how to optimize these resources
to the maximum?". A possible answer to these questions relies on the usage of grid
computing.
Taking into account the parallel and distributed nature of grid computing, we can say
that grid computing allows for more scalability in terms of a growing number of players,
guarantees shorter communication time between clients and servers, and allows for a
better resource management and usage (e.g., memory, CPU, core balancing usage, etc.)
than the traditional serial computing model.
However, the main focus of this thesis is not about grid computing. Instead, this
thesis describes the re-engineering process of an existing multiplayer computer game,
called Jake2, by transforming it into a MMOG, which is then put to run on a grid
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