Open software to innovation: the critical success factors of massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPG) in China and Ireland.

This project investigates the factors leading to the success of China’s Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG) market and gives an analysis of how Open source has contributed to these success factors. It then will look at how the use of open source is mirrored in Ireland’s market for example, the software sector to see if the same factors are apparent or there are indicators of these. Knowledge Management plays a very important role for fasten the innovation of Open source software development in China

Models, methods, and tools for developing MMOG backends on commodity clouds

Online multiplayer games have grown to unprecedented scales, attracting millions of players worldwide. The revenue from this industry has already eclipsed well-established entertainment industries like music and films and is expected to continue its rapid growth in the future. Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) have also been extensively used in research studies and education, further motivating the need to improve their development process. The development of resource-intensive, distributed, real-time applications like MMOG backends involves a variety of challenges. Past research has primarily focused on the development and deployment of MMOG backends on dedicated infrastructures such as on-premise data centers and private clouds, which provide more flexibility but are expensive and hard to set up and maintain. A limited set of works has also focused on utilizing the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) layer of public clouds to deploy MMOG backends. These clouds can offer various advantages like a lower barrier to entry, a larger set of resources, etc. but lack resource elasticity, standardization, and focus on development effort, from which MMOG backends can greatly benefit. Meanwhile, other research has also focused on solving various problems related to consistency, performance, and scalability. Despite major advancements in these areas, there is no standardized development methodology to facilitate these features and assimilate the development of MMOG backends on commodity clouds. This thesis is motivated by the results of a systematic mapping study that identifies a gap in research, evident from the fact that only a handful of studies have explored the possibility of utilizing serverless environments within commodity clouds to host these types of backends. These studies are mostly vision papers and do not provide any novel contributions in terms of methods of development or detailed analyses of how such systems could be developed. Using the knowledge gathered from this mapping study, several hypotheses are proposed and a set of technical challenges is identified, guiding the development of a new methodology. The peculiarities of MMOG backends have so far constrained their development and deployment on commodity clouds despite rapid advancements in technology. To explore whether such environments are viable options, a feasibility study is conducted with a minimalistic MMOG prototype to evaluate a limited set of public clouds in terms of hosting MMOG backends. Foli lowing encouraging results from this study, this thesis first motivates toward and then presents a set of models, methods, and tools with which scalable MMOG backends can be developed for and deployed on commodity clouds. These are encapsulated into a software development framework called Athlos which allows software engineers to leverage the proposed development methodology to rapidly create MMOG backend prototypes that utilize the resources of these clouds to attain scalable states and runtimes. The proposed approach is based on a dynamic model which aims to abstract the data requirements and relationships of many types of MMOGs. Based on this model, several methods are outlined that aim to solve various problems and challenges related to the development of MMOG backends, mainly in terms of performance and scalability. Using a modular software architecture, and standardization in common development areas, the proposed framework aims to improve and expedite the development process leading to higher-quality MMOG backends and a lower time to market. The models and methods proposed in this approach can be utilized through various tools during the development lifecycle. The proposed development framework is evaluated qualitatively and quantitatively. The thesis presents three case study MMOG backend prototypes that validate the suitability of the proposed approach. These case studies also provide a proof of concept and are subsequently used to further evaluate the framework. The propositions in this thesis are assessed with respect to the performance, scalability, development effort, and code maintainability of MMOG backends developed using the Athlos framework, using a variety of methods such as small and large-scale simulations and more targeted experimental setups. The results of these experiments uncover useful information about the behavior of MMOG backends. In addition, they provide evidence that MMOG backends developed using the proposed methodology and hosted on serverless environments can: (a) support a very high number of simultaneous players under a given latency threshold, (b) elastically scale both in terms of processing power and memory capacity and (c) significantly reduce the amount of development effort. The results also show that this methodology can accelerate the development of high-performance, distributed, real-time applications like MMOG backends, while also exposing the limitations of Athlos in terms of code maintainability. Finally, the thesis provides a reflection on the research objectives, considerations on the hypotheses and technical challenges, and outlines plans for future work in this domain

Sla Management in a Collaborative Network Of Federated Clouds: The Cloudland

Cloud services have always promised to be available, flexible, and speedy. However, not a single Cloud provider can deliver such promises to their distinctly demanding customers. Cloud providers have a constrained geographical presence, and are willing to invest in infrastructure only when it is profitable to them. Cloud federation is a concept that collectively combines segregated Cloud services to create an extended pool of resources for Clouds to competently deliver their promised level of services. This dissertation is concerned with studying the governing aspects related to the federation of Clouds through collaborative networking. The main objective of this dissertation is to define a framework for a Cloud network that considers balancing the trade-offs among customers’ various quality of service (QoS) requirements, as well as providers\u27 resources utilization. We propose a network of federated Clouds, CloudLend, that creates a platform for Cloud providers to collaborate, and for customers to expand their service selections. We also define and specify a service level agreement (SLA) management model in order to govern and administer the relationships established between different Cloud services in CloudLend. We define a multi-level SLA specification model to annotate and describe QoS terms, in addition to a game theory-based automated SLA negotiation model that supports both customers and providers in negotiating SLA terms, and guiding them towards signing a contract. We also define an adaptive agent-based SLA monitoring model which identifies the root causes of SLA violations, and impartially distributes any updates and changes in established SLAs to all relevant entities. Formal verification proved that our proposed framework assures customers with maximum optimized guarantees to their QoS requirements, in addition to supporting Cloud providers to make informed resource utilization decisions. Additionally, simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our SLA management model. Our proposed Cloud Lend network and its SLA management model paves the way to resource sharing among different Cloud providers, which allows for the providers’ lock-in constraints to be broken, allowing effortless migration of customers’ applications across different providers whenever is needed

Design of a horizontally scalable backend application for online games

Mobile game market is increasing in popularity year after year, attracting a wide audience of independent developers who must endure the competition of other more resourceful game companies. Players expect high quality games and experiences, while developers strive to monetize. Researches have shown a correlation between some features of a game and its likelihood to succeed and be a potential candidate to enter the top grossing lists. This thesis focuses on identifying the trending features found on the current most successful games, and proposes the design of a scalable, flexible and modular backend application which integrates all the services needed for fulfilling the common needs of a mobile online game. A microservice oriented architecture have been used as a basis for the system design, leading to a modular decomposition of features into small, independent, reusable services. The system and microservices design comply with the Reactive Manifesto, allowing the application to reach responsiveness, elasticity, resiliency and asynchronicity. For its properties, the application is suitable to serve on a cloud environment covering the requirements for small games and popular games with high load of traffic and many concurrent players. The thesis, in addition to the application and microservices design, includes a discussion on the technology stack for a possible implementation and recommended setup for three use case scenarios

Virtual Online Worlds: Towards a Collaborative Space for Architects

Although research has been trickling forth in the last eight years about online collaboration and use of virtual online worlds (VOW) amongst architects and architectural students (2006-2010), little discussion is dedicated to how the use of VOWs have improved collaboration, communication and quality of design for those that have used it. Researching VOWs and their use in architecture was a difficult task since much of what needed to be found was scattered amongst the fields of education, construction engineering, computer science and even online blogs dedicated to architecture in video games. An analysis of those findings has contributed to the development of a pilot project conducted in a VOW called Blue Mars. The project was set up in order to discover how VOWs improve communication skills of its users and analyze what happens when architecture students are allowed to virtually experience their designs as avatars. This study is part of a growing body of research on the exploration of virtual online worlds in the practice of architecture both in the classroom and out in the field