Modeling ping times in first person shooter games

In First Person Shooter (FPS) games the Round Trip Time (RTT), i.e., the sum of the network delay from client to server and the network delay from server to client, impacts the game

Behavior Pattern Recognition of Game Dragon Nest Using Bloom Filter Method

Dragon Nest is one of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game (MMORPG online games. It has become the most popular online game played by people around the world. This work observes two examples of the MMORPG online games: the Dragon Nest INA and the Legend DN II. The purpose is to analyze the traffic data of the Dragon Nest to find and discern the patterns of behavior of the Dragon Nest INA and the Legend DN II using Deep Packet Inspection (DPI).  A dataset is constructed by capturing traffic data from the testbed environment. Then feature extraction, feature selection, and visualization are performed during the experiments. Experiment results shows the traffic data of the Dragon Nest INA is higher than the Legend DN II. It is because of the difference in the number of entries in the game. Then, the Bloom filter method is used as a tool to check the existence of a pattern of the Dragon Nest in the dataset. The false positive rate of matching is 0.399576%

From Team Play to Squad Play: The Militarisation of Interactions in Multiplayer FPS Video Games

Since the onset of E-sports we have seen the development from casual players to professional players who push the boundary of game mastery to new heights via coordinated team play. In this short paper I explore how a group of video game players adopt military-style communication methods and strategies to coordinate their actions in the popular tactical First Person Shooter (FPS) video game DayZ (Bohemia Interactive, 2014).  Utilising the key components of team interaction in the context of distributed and ad-hoc military teams (Pascual et al., 1997), I show how a group of players evolved their interactions from team play to squad play. I argue that squad play is an advancement of the strategic and tactical thinking embodied in team play through the adoption of real-world military interaction and communication strategies

The Effects of Network Latency on Player Gaming Experience

Humans spend 3 billion hours a week playing video games. While playing, network latencies can cause interaction delay between the client and the server and affect players’ gaming experiences. We built two games that isolate two fundamental game actions (shooting and movement) to evaluate how players are affected by network latency. Game statistics were used to evaluate performance, and emotion detection software and a heart rate monitor were used to evaluate players’ stress level during gameplay. Our results from a 36-person user study show that players’ performance decreases as latency increases and players’ stress level increases as latency increases

Qualitative Evaluation of Latency and Packet Loss in a Cloud-based Games

On-demand multimedia services are more popularthan ever and continue to grow. Consumers can now streammusic, movies, television, and video games at the push of abutton. Such services typically require a minimum connectionspeed to support streaming. However, transient network effectssuch as packet loss and delay variation can play a crucial role indetermining the user quality of experience (QoE) in streamingmultimedia systems. This paper will seek to establish thesubjective impact of negative network effects on the userexperience of a popular cloud-based on-demand video gameservice

Quality of experience driven control of interactive media stream parameters

In recent years, cloud computing has led to many new kinds of services. One of these popular services is cloud gaming, which provides the entire game experience to the users remotely from a server, but also other applications are provided in a similar manner. In this paper we focus on the option to render the application in the cloud, thereby delivering the graphical output of the application to the user as a video stream. In more general terms, an interactive media stream is set up over the network between the user's device and the cloud server. The main issue with this approach is situated at the network, that currently gives little guarantees on the quality of service in terms of parameters such as available bandwidth, latency or packet loss. However, for interactive media stream cases, the user is merely interested in the perceived quality, regardless of the underlaying network situation. In this paper, we present an adaptive control mechanism that optimizes the quality of experience for the use case of a race game, by trading off visual quality against frame rate in function of the available bandwidth. Practical experiments verify that QoE driven adaptation leads to improved user experience compared to systems solely taking network characteristics into account

Research Resources for Network Application Studies

The growth of computer networks has led to increasing diversity of Internet applications, including streaming media and network games. However, without precise information on how network and system improvements benefit the networked application user, it is difficult to properly assess the benefits of new network treatments or to design the next generation networks that will effectively support the QoS of emerging applications. This research attempts to bridge this gap in understanding with three innovative projects: 1) integrating measures of network performance with user perception; 2) quality of service for network games; and 3) perceived quality of adaptive streaming media repair. With the requested research resources, we have developed an application performance studies laboratory that allows us to finely control network performance for a range of selected networked applications. Each project shares research resources in the new laboratory to measure performance for interactive applications, network games and streaming media repair, as appropriate