5 research outputs found
Design Issues for Peer-to-Peer Massively Multiplayer Online Games.
Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) are increasing in both popularity and scale, and while classical Client/Server (C/S) 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 (IM), game event dissemination, Non-Player Character (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
Análisis e Implementación de Arquitectura de un MMORPG para Celulares
El presente estudio realiza un análisis de diferentes arquitecturas asociadas con la creación de juegos de video. Como resultado del análisis, se definieron algunos factores para la creación de una arquitectura como: facilidad de implementación, escalabilidad, seguridad, carga para el servidor, tiempos de respuesta de la conexión y la fiabilidad de la interconexión. La topología definida para la arquitectura propuesta es híbrida, dado que utiliza los beneficios de cliente servidor y P2P. Como siguiente paso, se implementa la arquitectura propuesta mediante la creación de un juego de video de género MMROPG multiplataforma, para luego realizar mediciones de latencia, cuadros por segundo y estrés del servidor, y poner a prueba la usabilidad de la arquitectura. El juego resultante, basado en la arquitectura lograda tras el análisis comparativo, prueba ser funcional tanto en móviles como en computadores, y logra velocidades aceptables de conexiones, de tazas de actualización, y de estrés del servidor
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
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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