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Assignments
Learning Objectives
For Week 8-12, after each lecture, students are expected to understand
the following.
- Week 8 (9th Oct)
- The meaning of ``networked games'' with respect to CS4344
- Different types of networked games (FPS, RTS, MMORPG)
- Different choices of transport protocol (TCP vs UDP, when to use
which?))
- Different network architectures (centralized, P2P, hybrid) and
their pros and cons)
- Why developing multi-player games over the Internet is non-trivial
- How latency affects playability for RTS and FPS games
- Week 9 (16th Oct)
- Synchornization protocols -- how they trade-off between
responsiveness, fairness, and consistency (local-lag, delay at server,
short circuiting, lock-step protocol, bucket synchronization)
- Dead reckoning -- how to predict and how to converge, trade-off
between accuracy, smoothness, and number of messages.
- Time warp -- how to mitigate inconsistent situations when
inconsistenct is discovered, what are the drawbacks of Time warp.
- Week 10 (23rd Oct)
- The importance of reducing data rate per client in a MMORPG
- Interest management based on Aura, nimbus and focus
- Region-based interest management and the issues considered in
choosing cell size/shape
- Hierarchical interest management and load balancing
- Visibility-based interest management and its applicability to games
- Advantages of isolating cells (via constraints in games) when mapping
cells to different servers
- Considerations for choosing application-level multicast trees --
end-to-end delay, resource usage, number of connections
- Steiner minimum tree, shortest path tree and minimum spanning
tree (and their degree-constraint versions), and their trade-offs
(with respect to the three considerations above).
- Week 11 (30th Oct, NetGames 2006)
- Proxy-based architecture for MMOG and its strength/weaknesses
- Server authoritative, client-authoritative and hybrid approach (dynamic
assignment of authority)
- Using public servers for MMOG and its challenges
- Triangular tile-based interest management algorithms (need not know how
to compute Delaunay triangulation)
- Week 12 (6th Nov)
- Cheating in different layers: games, applications, protocol and network
- Timing Cheat: e.g. Look-ahead cheat, suppress-correct cheat
- Cheating by collusion
- Cheating by misplaced trust: e.g. Battleship
- Preventing look-ahead cheat with lockstep protocol (using encryption and 1-way hash)
- Overview of NEO protocol
- Detecting cheats in Battleship
- Week 13 (13th Nov)
- Maphacks
- Preventing information exposure in RTS games
Lecture Slides
- Week 0 - Module Overview
- Week 1 - Introduction
- Week 2 - Design, Platform, Architecture Tools
- Week 3 - 2D Mobile Games: General Programming Structure, Game Engine, SVG
- Week 4 & 5- Networked Mobile Games - GSM, GPRS, SMS, 3G, Bluetooth...
- Week 6 - UI, Data Persistency, Audio and Video for Games...
- Week 7 - 3D Mobile Games
- No slides available for Week 8 - 13. Students are encouraged to take notes during lectures (copy by hand, take snapshot of
the board with camera/cellphone, etc.)
Lab Exercises