Distributed game

Dissertação de mestrado em Engenharia InformáticaThe demand for online games has risen over the years, expanding multiplayer support for new and different game genres. Among them are Massively Multiplayer Online games, one of the most popular and successful game types in the industry. Nowadays, this industry is thriving, evolving alongside technological advancements and producing billions in revenue, making it an economic importance. However, as the complexity of these games grows, so do the challenges they face when constructing them. This dissertation aims to implement a distributed game, through a proof of concept or an existing game, using a distributed architecture to acquire knowledge in the construction of such complex systems and the effort involved in dealing with consistency, maintaining communication infrastructure, and managing data in a distributed way. It is also intended that this project implements multiple mechanisms capable of autonomously helping manage and maintain the correct state of the system. To evaluate the proposed solution, a detailed analysis is carried out with performance benchmark analysis, stress testing, followed by an examination of its security, scalability, and distribution’s resilience. Overall, the present research work allowed for a greater understanding of the technologies and approaches used in constructing a gaming system, establishing a new set of development opportunities to be further investi gated upon the constructed solution.A procura por jogos online aumentou ao longo dos anos, expandindo o suporte multiplayer para novos e diferentes géneros. Entre estes estão os jogos Massively Multiplayer Online, um dos tipos de jogos mais populares e bem-sucedidos na indústria. Atualmente, esta indústria está a prosperar, evoluindo com os avanços tecnológicos e gerando milhares de milhões em receita, tornando-se uma importância económica. Porém, à medida que a complexidade destes jogos aumenta, também aumenta os problemas encontrados durante a sua construção. Esta dissertação tem como objetivo implementar um jogo distribuído, através de uma prova de conceito ou um jogo existente, usando uma arquitetura distribuída a fim de adquirir conhecimento na construção destes sistemas complexos e o esforço envolvido em lidar com consistência, manter a infraestrutura de comunicação e gerir dados de maneira distribuída. Para isto, é pretendido que este projeto também implemente vários mecanismos capazes de, forma autônoma, ajudar a gerir e manter o correto estado do sistema. Para avaliar o solução proposta, uma análise detalhada é realizada sobre o desempenho, segurança, escalabilidade e resiliência da distribuição do sistema. De forma geral, o presente trabalho de pesquisa permitiu uma maior compreensão das tecnologias e abordagens utilizadas na construção de um sistema de jogos, estabelecendo um novo conjunto de oportunidades de desenvolvimento a serem investigadas sobre a solução construída

Load-balancing for Peer-to-peer Networked Virtual Environment

International audienc

Load-balancing for Peer-to-peer Networked Virtual Environment

點對點網路允許每一台電腦直接連結到其他電腦做溝通。現在最常見的應用是檔案分享。不過，分散式運算才是點對點網路的主要功能。 網路遊戲是現在最流行的趨勢，而目前市面上看得到的多人角色扮演遊戲(MMORPG, Massive Multi-user Online Role Playing Game) 都是採用傳統的主從式架構。這樣的架構有下列幾個壞處：伺服器的建置成本高；伺服器一旦出問題就會導致整個遊戲無法進行；提供遊戲的廠商需提供數個伺服器以容納更多的使用者。但是，連接到不同伺服器的玩家其實並不在相同的環境中。 本論文是針對MMORPG，提出一個點對點的架構，並且加入動態狀態資訊分配 (DSID, Dynamic Status Information Distribution) 來解決上述主從式架構下所產生的問題，以期能做出一個建置成本低並且富有彈性的遊戲架構，同時也允許所有的使用者都能夠在同樣的一個環境中進行互動。The peer-to-peer network allows each computer to connect to other computers directly. Its most popular application today is file sharing, but distributed computing is the main function of peer-to-peer network. The trend of games is online games. Most MMORPGs (Massive Multi-user Online Role Playing Games) we can see today are based on client-server architecture. This causes some disadvantages as follows: the server is very expensive and the failure of the server fails the whole game. Besides, the vendor of a game need to provide several servers to allow more players playing at the same time, but players connect to different servers are in the different virtual environments. This thesis provides a peer-to-peer architecture with dynamic status information distribution (DSID) mechanism for MMORPG to address the issues occurred in the client-server architecture. We hope to construct a low-cost and flexible architecture that allows all players to interact to each other in the same virtual environment.摘要 I Abstract II Chapter 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Motivation 1 1.2 Objectives 2 1.3 Thesis Organization 3 Chapter 2 Background 4 2.1 Peer-to-peer Architecture 4 2.1.1 Structured vs. Unstructured 6 2.1.2 Topologies of Peer-to-peer Architecture 7 2.1.3 JXTA Project 8 2.2 Multiplayer Online Games 9 2.2.1 Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games 10 2.2.2 MMORPG Based on Peer-to-peer Architecture 10 2.2.3 Zone Model and Zoned Federation Model 11 Chapter 3 System Architecture 14 3.1 Related Work 14 3.1.1 Hybrid Peer-to-peer Solution 14 3.1.2 Load-balancing Tree 16 3.2 Our System Architecture 18 3.2.1 Overview 18 3.2.2 Event Delivery Mechanism 19 3.2.3 Interactions between Subservers 21 3.2.4 Dynamic Load-balancing Mechanism 23 Chapter 4 Evaluation 32 4.1 Experiment settings and assumptions 32 4.2 Evaluation results 34 4.2.1 Connections established 34 4.2.2 Computation overhead 35 4.2.3 Bandwidth requirement 36 4.2.4 Response delay 37 Chapter 5 Conclusions and Future Work 39 5.1 Conclusions 39 5.2 Future work 40 References 42 Appendix System Implementation 4

Update propagation for peer-to-peer-based massively multi-user virtual environments

Over the last decade Massively Multi-user Virtual Environments (MMVEs) have become an integral part of modern culture and business. Applications for these large-scale virtual environments range from gaming to business and scientific research. Some MMVEs reach a user base in the tens of millions and the total number of users is estimated in the billions. Despite this success, launching an MMVEs is still a risky proposition. This is in large part due to the high cost associated with setting up and maintaining the necessary server infrastructure. One way of reducing the costs of operating MMVEs is to switch their system architecture from the current client/server-based model to one based on peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies. This has the potential to significantly reduce the infrastructure costs of MMVEs, as users bring their own resources into the P2P system and servers are no longer required, thus decreasing expenses and market entry barriers. This thesis describes a scalable and low-latency update propagation system for P2P-based MMVEs. Update propagation refers to the exchange of information about changes in the virtual environment between users and is one of the key components of MMVEs. Thus, the described system represents a key step towards operating MMVEs as fully distributed peer-to-peer systems

Dynamic Load Balancing for Massively Multiplayer Online Games

In recent years, there has been an important growth of online gaming. Today’s Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) can contain millions of synchronous players scattered across the world and participating with each other within a single shared game. Traditional Client/Server architectures of MMOGs exhibit different problems in scalability, reliability, and latency, as well as the cost of adding new servers when demand is too high. P2P architecture provides considerable support for scalability of MMOGs. It also achieves good response times by supporting direct connections between players. This thesis proposes a novel hybrid Peer-to-Peer architecture for MMOGs and a new dynamic load balancing for massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) based this hybrid Peer-to-Peer architecture. We have divided the game world space into several regions. Each region in the game world space is controlled and managed by using both a super-peer and a clone-super-peer. The region's super-peer is responsible for distributing the game update among the players inside the region, as well as managing the game communications between the players. However, the clone-super-peer is responsible for controlling the players' migration from one region to another, in addition to be the super-peer of the region when the super-peer leaves the game. In this thesis, we have designed and simulated a static and dynamic Area of Interest Management (AoIM) for MMOGs based on both architectures hybrid P2P and client-server with the possibility of players to move from one region to another. In this thesis also, we have designed and evaluated the static and dynamic load balancing for MMOGs based on hybrid P2P architecture. We have used OPNET Modeler 18.0 to simulate and evaluate the proposed system, especially standard applications, custom applications, TDMA and RX Group. Our dynamic load balancer is responsible for distributing the load among the regions in the game world space. The position of the load balancer is located between the game server and the regions. The results, following extensive experiments, show that low delay and higher traffic communication can be achieved using both of hybrid P2P architecture, static and dynamic AoIM, dynamic load balancing for MMOGs based on hybrid P2P system

Interaktive latenzkritische Anwendungen in mobilen Ad-hoc Netzen

In this thesis we discuss the challenges that latency-sensitive interactive applications face in mobile ad-hoc networks. By using multi-player games as an example, we argue that the traditional client-server architecture is unsuitable for this new environment. We consequently create a novel communication architecture as well as quality of service mechanisms that can support the network requirements of such applications in mobile environments. By using a number of distributed zone servers that are selected and managed dynamically by our server selection algorithm, we provide a scalable approach that offers the necessary redundancy. Furthermore, we propose additional quality of service mechanisms to reduce latency and packet loss for interactive applications. We evaluate our approach through network simulation and realistic mobile gaming scenarios. The performance of our evaluation is checked against real-world measurements.In dieser Arbeit werden die Probleme und Herausforderungen von latenz-kritischen interactiven Computeranwendungen in mobilen Ad-hoc Netzen untersucht. Am Beispiel von Mehrbenutzercomputerspielen zeigen wir, dass traditionelle Client-Server Architekturen für diese neuen Umgebungen ungeeignet sind. Im Rahmen dieser Arbeit wird daher eine neue Kommunikationsarchitektur sowie verschiedene Mechanismen zur Erhöhung der Dienstgüte vorgeschlagen. Mit Hilfe von Zonenserver, die durch den Serverauswahlalgorithmus ausgesucht und verwaltet werden zeigen wir einen Ansatz auf, der sowohl bezüglich der Netzgröße skalierbar ist als auch die notwendige Redundanz bereitstellt. Wir zeigen die Funktionalität und die Leistung unseres Ansatzes mit Hilfe von Netzsimulationen bei denen realistische Szenarien für mobiles Spielen simuliert werden. Der hierbei benutze Netzsimulator wurde dafür auf Basis von eigenen Messungen verbessert und für das jeweilige Szenario passend eingestellt