Title :
Peer-to-peer support for massively multiplayer games
Author :
Knutsson, Bjorn ; Lu, Honghui ; Xu, Wei ; Hopkins, Bryan
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Comput. & Inf. Sci., Pennsylvania Univ., Philadelphia, PA, USA
Abstract :
We present an approach to support massively multiplayer games on peer-to-peer overlays. Our approach exploits the fact that players in MMGs display locality of interest, and therefore can form self-organizing groups based on their locations in the virtual world. To this end, we have designed scalable mechanisms to distribute the game state to the participating players and to maintain consistency in the face of node failures. The resulting system dynamically scales with the number of online players. It is more flexible and has a lower deployment cost than centralized games servers. We have implemented a simple game we call SimMud, and experimented with up to 4000 players to demonstrate the applicability of this approach.
Keywords :
Internet; computer games; SimMud; massively multiplayer game; node failure; online player; peer-to-peer overlay support; player participation; self-organizing group; Availability; Bandwidth; Computational Intelligence Society; Computer architecture; Costs; Frequency; Grid computing; Memory management; Peer to peer computing; Scalability;
Conference_Titel :
INFOCOM 2004. Twenty-third AnnualJoint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies
Print_ISBN :
0-7803-8355-9
DOI :
10.1109/INFCOM.2004.1354485