1,928 research outputs found
Living City, A Collaborative Browser-Based Massively Multiplayer Online Game
This work presents the design and implementation of our Browser-based Massively Multiplayer Online Game, Living City, a simulation game fully developed at the University of Messina. Living City is a persistent and real-time digital world, running in the Web browser environment and accessible from users without any client-side installation. Today Massively Multiplayer Online Games attract the attention of Computer Scientists both for their architectural peculiarity and the close interconnection with the social network phenomenon. We will cover these two aspects paying particular attention to some aspects of the project: game balancing (e.g. algorithms behind time and money balancing); business logic (e.g., handling concurrency, cheating avoidance and availability) and, finally, social and psychological aspects involved in the collaboration of players, analyzing their activities and interconnections
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
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
Bipartite electronic SLA as a business framework to support cross-organization load management of real-time online applications
Online applications such as games and e-learning applications fall within the broader category of real-time online interactive applications (ROIA), a new class of ‘killer’ application for the Grid that is being investigated in the edutain@grid project. The two case studies in edutain@grid are an online game and an e-learning training application. We present a novel Grid-based business framework that makes use of bipartite service level agreements (SLAs) and dynamic invoice models to model complex business relationships in a massively scalable and flexible way. We support cross-organization load management at the business level, through zone migration. For evaluation we look at existing and extended value chains, the quality of service (QoS) metrics measured and the dynamic invoice models that support this work. We examine the causal links from customer quality of experience (QoE) and service provider quality of business (QoBiz) through to measured quality of service. Finally we discuss a shared reward business ecosystem and suggest how extended service level agreements and invoice models can support this
Optimal configuration of active and backup servers for augmented reality cooperative games
Interactive applications as online games and mobile devices have become more and more popular in recent years. From their combination, new and interesting cooperative services could be generated. For instance, gamers endowed with Augmented Reality (AR) visors connected as wireless nodes in an ad-hoc network, can interact with each other while immersed in the game. To enable this vision, we discuss here a hybrid architecture enabling game play in ad-hoc mode instead of the traditional client-server setting. In our architecture, one of the player nodes also acts as the server of the game, whereas other backup server nodes are ready to become active servers in case of disconnection of the network i.e. due to low energy level of the currently active server. This allows to have a longer gaming session before incurring in disconnections or energy exhaustion. In this context, the server election strategy with the aim of maximizing network lifetime is not so straightforward. To this end, we have hence analyzed this issue through a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model and both numerical and simulation-based analysis shows that the backup servers solution fulfills its design objective
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