836 research outputs found
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
Scalable Resource and QoS Brokering Mechanisms for Massively Multiplayer Online Games
Multiplayer online games have become an increasingly integral part of online entertainment.
With advances in social media, the number of players of these games is
increasing at a very rapid rate, which in some cases has been observed to be exponential.
This is when resource becomes a concern. In this thesis, I investigated several
challenges in developing and maintaining multiplayer games such as hotspots, genrespeci
c limitations, unpredictable quality of service and rigidity in resource availability.
I showed that these issues can be solved by adopting mechanisms for separation
of resource concerns from functional concerns and coordination of resources. To support
resource coordination, I divided the ownership of resources among three partiesgame
owner, resource owner and game player. I developed the CyberOrgs-MMOG
API, which supports Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) platforms capable
of resource sharing among multiple peers, through mechanisms for acquiring
these resources dynamically. I showed that dynamic acquisition of resources can
solve the resource questions mentioned above. The API was evaluated using a 2D
game with up to 250 simulated players. I also showed, how the game's responsiveness
can be dynamically adjusted in a scalable way. This thesis presents the design and
implementation of the CyberOrgs-MMOG API, interfaces provided to the interacting
agents representing di erent parties. I integrated a 2D multiplayer game with
the API and evaluated the mechanisms supported by the API
Solving key design issues for massively multiplayer online games on peer-to-peer architectures
Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) are increasing in both popularity and
scale on the Internet and are predominantly implemented by Client/Server architectures.
While such a classical approach to distributed system design offers many benefits, it suffers
from significant technical and commercial drawbacks, primarily reliability and scalability
costs. This realisation has sparked recent research interest in adapting MMOGs
to Peer-to-Peer (P2P) architectures.
This thesis identifies six key design issues to be addressed by P2P MMOGs, namely
interest management, event dissemination, task sharing, state persistency, cheating mitigation,
and incentive mechanisms. Design alternatives for each issue are systematically
compared, and their interrelationships discussed. How well representative P2P MMOG
architectures fulfil the design criteria is also evaluated. It is argued that although P2P
MMOG architectures are developing rapidly, their support for task sharing and incentive
mechanisms still need to be improved.
The design of a novel framework for P2P MMOGs, Mediator, is presented. It employs a
self-organising super-peer network over a P2P overlay infrastructure, and addresses the
six design issues in an integrated system. The Mediator framework is extensible, as it
supports flexible policy plug-ins and can accommodate the introduction of new superpeer
roles. Key components of this framework have been implemented and evaluated
with a simulated P2P MMOG.
As the Mediator framework relies on super-peers for computational and administrative
tasks, membership management is crucial, e.g. to allow the system to recover from
super-peer failures. A new technology for this, namely Membership-Aware Multicast
with Bushiness Optimisation (MAMBO), has been designed, implemented and evaluated.
It reuses the communication structure of a tree-based application-level multicast
to track group membership efficiently. Evaluation of a demonstration application shows
i
that MAMBO is able to quickly detect and handle peers joining and leaving. Compared
to a conventional supervision architecture, MAMBO is more scalable, and yet incurs
less communication overheads. Besides MMOGs, MAMBO is suitable for other P2P
applications, such as collaborative computing and multimedia streaming.
This thesis also presents the design, implementation and evaluation of a novel task
mapping infrastructure for heterogeneous P2P environments, Deadline-Driven Auctions
(DDA). DDA is primarily designed to support NPC host allocation in P2P MMOGs, and
specifically in the Mediator framework. However, it can also support the sharing of computational
and interactive tasks with various deadlines in general P2P applications. Experimental
and analytical results demonstrate that DDA efficiently allocates computing
resources for large numbers of real-time NPC tasks in a simulated P2P MMOG with approximately
1000 players. Furthermore, DDA supports gaming interactivity by keeping
the communication latency among NPC hosts and ordinary players low. It also supports
flexible matchmaking policies, and can motivate application participants to contribute
resources to the system
Bootstrapping Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games
Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) are a prominent genre in today\u27s video game industry with the most popular MMORPGs generating billions of dollars in revenue and attracting millions of players. As they have grown, they have become a major target for both technological research and sociological research. In such research, it is nearly impossible to reach the same player scale from any self-made technology or sociological experiments. This greatly limits the amount of control and topics that can be explored. In an effort to make up a lacking or non-existent player-base for custom-made MMORPG research scenarios A.I. agents, impersonating human players, can be used to bootstrap the research scenario to reach the necessary massive number of players that define the game genre.
This thesis presents a system that makes its human players and A.I. players indistinguishable while preserving the basic characteristics of a typical MMORPG. To better achieve identical perception of human and A.I. players, our system centers around the collection, sharing, and exchange of information while limiting the means of expression and actions of players. A gameplay scenario built on the Panoptyk engine was constructed to imitate gameplay experienced in major MMORPGs. We conducted a user-study where subjects play through the scenario with a varying number of A.I. players unknown to them. Three versions of the scenario were created to assess how indistinguishable human and A.I. players were and vice versa.
We found, across 24 participants, there were 32% correct identifications, 30% incorrect identifications, and 38% answers of I don\u27t know . This was broken down into 20% correct identifications, 42% incorrect identifications, and 38% answers of I don\u27t know for bot characters and 46% correct identifications, 16% incorrect identifications, and 38% answers of ``I don\u27t know\u27\u27 for human characters
Evaluation of Scalability and Communication in MMOGs
Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) can involve millions of synchronous players scattered across the world and participating with each other within a single shared game. One of the most significant issues in MMOGs is scalability and it is impact on the responsiveness and the quality of the game. In this paper, we propose a new architecture to increase the scalability without affecting the responsiveness of the game, using a hybrid Peer-to-Peer system. This mechanism consists of central servers to control and manage the game state, as well as super-peer and clone-super-peer to control and manage sub-networks of nodes sharing common regions of the game world. We use the OPNET Modeler to simulate the system and compare the results with client/server system to show the difference in delay and traffic received for various applications such as remote login, database, HTTP, and FTP sessions which are all part of an MMOG system. We use four scenarios for each system to evaluate the scalability of the system with different number of peers (i.e.125, 250, 500, and 1000 peers). The results show that the hybrid P2P system is more scalable for MMOGs when compared with client/server system
Peer-to-peer live video streaming with rateless codes for massively multiplayer online games
International audienc
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