Lecture 13: Review Lecture

• Slides: PDF

Lecture 12: TCP for Games

• Slides: PDF
• Notes:
• References:

[Chen06]

Kuan-Ta Chen, Chun-Ying Huang, Polly Huang, Chin-Laung Lei, "An empirical evaluation of TCP performance in online games," in Proc. of ACE 2006 [from Kuan-Ta Chen (aka Chun-Yang Chen) Homepage]

[Griw06]

C Griwodz, P. Halvorsen, "The Fun of using TCP for an MMORPG"", NOSSDAV 2006 [Available from Simula Research Lab]

[Harc07]

S. Harcsik, A Petlund, C Griwodz, P. Halvorsen, "Latency Evaluation of Networking Mechanisms for Game Traffic", NetGames 2007 [Available on NetGames 2007 Website]

Lecture 11: Proxy

• Slides: PDF
• Notes:
• References:

[Guo05]

K. Guo et. al, "A Fair Message Exchange Framework for Distributed Multi-Player Games," in Proc. NetGames 2003. [Google Scholar]

Lecture 10: Hybrid Architecture

• Slides: PDF
• Notes:
  The second part of the class is based on [Chen05] and [Vlee05]. The introductions of the papers also gave an overview of zoned server architecture.
• References:

[Chen05]

J. Chen et. al, "Locality Aware Dynamic Load management for Massively Multiplayer Games," in Proc. PPoPP 2005. [Google Scholar]

[Vlee05]

Bart De Vleeschauwer et. al, "Dynamic Microcell Assignment for Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming", NetGames 2005, [Google Scholar]

Lecture 9: DHT-based Architecture

• Slides: PDF
• Notes:
  • Source code and other information for Colyseus is available at its homepage
  • A more detailed description and improved version of Mercury can be found in a later paper A. Bharambe, M. Agrawal and S. Seshan, "Mercury: Supporting Scalable Multi-Attribute Range Queries", SIGCOMM 2004, Portland, August 2004.
• References:

[Knut05]

B. Knutsson, H. Lu, W. Xu, and B. Hopkins, "Peer-to-Peer Support for Massively Multiplayer Games," in Proc. IEEE INFOCOM, Mar. 2004, pp. 96-107. [Google Scholar]

[Bhar05]

A. Bharambe, J. Pang and S. Seshan, "A Distributed Architecture for Multiplayer Games", CMU CS Technical Report Number CMU-CS-05-112. [PDF]

[Bhar02]

A. Bharambe, S. Rao and S. Seshan, "MERCURY: A Scalable Publish-Subscribe System for Internet Games", First International Workshop on Network and System Support for Games (NetGames) 2002, [PDF]

Lecture 8: DHT

• Slides: PDF
• Notes:
  • We will have Quiz 2.
  • Luitpold and Huiquan will share their design of Assignment 1 and show us a demo.
  • Details of Pastry and Scribe can be found on its project page.

Lecture 7: Interest Management in Peer-to-Peer Games

• Slides: PDF
• Notes:
  • [Stee05] is the main reference for Frontier Sets.
  • [Hu06] is the main reference for VON.
  • The VAST homepage provides many resources (papers, slides, demo, source code) related to VON.
• References:

[Stee05]

A. Steed and C. Angus, "Supporting Scalable Peer to Peer Virtual Environments using Frontier Sets," IEEE Virtual Reality 2005 (VR2005), Bonn, Germany, March 2005. [Google Scholar]

[Hu06]

Shun-Yun Hu, Jui-Fa Chen and Tsu-Han Chen, "VON: A Scalable Peer-to-Peer Network for Virtual Environments," IEEE Network, vol. 20, no. 4, Jul./Aug. 2006, pp. 22-31 Available on VAST publication page

Lecture 6: Synchronization in Peer-to-Peer Games

• Slides: PDF
• Notes:
  • Bucket synchronization is used in MiMaze [Gaut98].
  • [Bret01] provides a good account on how synchornized simulation are implemented from the view of AoE.
  • [Baug01] introduces lockstep protocol and asynchrornous synchronization. Pipeline Lockstep and Adaptive Pipeline Lockstep are introduced in [Cron03]
  • Section 10.1.2 of [Smed06] gives a very brief overview of three lockstep protocols. Section 9.5 of [Smed06] introduces synchronized simulation.
• References:

[Gaut98]

L. Gautier and C. Diot, "Design and evaluation of MiMaze, a multi-player game on the internet," in Proc. IEEE Multimedia Systems Conference, June 1998. [CiteSeer]

[Bret01]

P. Breetner, and M. Terrano "1500 Archers on a 28.8: Networking Programming in Age of Empires and Beyond". In Game Developers Conference '01. [Google Scholar]

[Baug01]

N. E. Baughman and B. N. Levine. "Cheat-proof playout for centralized and distributed online games.", In INFOCOM 2001, [CiteSeer]

[Cron03]

E. Cronin, B. Filstrup, and S. Jamin, "Cheat-Proofing Dead Reckoned Multiplayer Games", In ADCOG 2003, [U.Mich's Project Site]

Lecture 5: Interest Management

• Slides: PDF
• Notes:
  • A good overview of different interest management schemes can be found in [Boul06].
  • Cell-to-cell visibility algorithm is described in the context of interactive walkthrough in a classic paper by Teller [Tell91].
  • The generalized interest management scheme used in Lucid Platform 1.0 is described in a paper by Liu et al [Liu05], while the sort-based region matching algorithm is described in [Racz05].
• Note that you need to from within NUS (or connect through NUS Library proxy) to be able to download the papers from ACM Digital Library.
• References:

[Boul06]

J. Boulanger, J. Kienzle, and C. Verbrugge. Comparing interest management algorithms for massively multiplayer games. In NetGames '06. [ACM DL]

[Tell91]

S. Teller, and C. Sequin, Visibility preprocessing for interactive walkthroughs. In SIGGRAPH '91. [ACM DL]

[Liu05]

Liu E. S., Yip M. K., and Yu G. Scalable interest management for multidimensional routing space. In VRST '05. [ACM DL

[Racz05]

C. Raczy, G. Tan, and J. Yu, A sort-based DDM matching algorithm for HLA. ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulations 15(1) (Jan. 2005), 14-38. ACM DL

[Smed06]

Smed, J., Hakonon, H., Algorithms and Networking for Computer Games, July 2006. [NUS LINC]

Lecture 4: Local Perception Filter, Bullet Time, and Interest Management

• Slides: PDF
• Notes:
  • Local perception filter and bullet time are described in [Smed06].
  • MMD, a simulator for local perception filter and bullet time can be found on Smed's web site.
  • An overview of AOI mechanism is presented in [Smed06].
  • Network traffic analysis of ShenZhou online can be found in [Chen06].
• References:

[Chen06]

Chen, K., Huang, P., and Lei, C. 2006. Game traffic analysis: an MMORPG perspective, Computer Networks 50, 16 (Nov. 2006), 3002-3023. [Google Scholar]

[Smed06]

Smed, J., Hakonon, H., Algorithms and Networking for Computer Games, July 2006. [NUS LINC]

Lecture 3: Dead Reckoning

• Slides: PDF
• Notes:
  • Predictions, both local and opponent prediction, are discussed in [Armi06] Section 6.2. Dead reckoning is discussed in Section 9.3 of [Smed06].
  • ''Mock'' Quiz: (i) Prediction improves consistency but convergence reduces consistency. Among the four schemes, (prediction, no convergence) is the most accurate, while (no prediction, convergence) causes the most inconsistency. One can argue that in FPS games, the predicted position can quickly become inaccurate as players move and turn, thus having (no preduction, no convergence) is more accurate than normal dead reckoning. (ii) If only two previous points are considered, history-based prediction has not much advantages compared to using velocity. The drawback is that we can't consider higher order prediction (e.g. using acceleration). We can extend to three or more points, but it works well only if the points are colinear -- otherwise we can't predict the acceleration accurately.
• References:

[Armi06]

armitage, G., Claypool, M., and Branch, P. 2006. Networking and Online Games: Understanding and Engineering Multiplayer Internet Games," Wiley, June 2006. [NUS LINC]

[Smed06]

Smed, J., Hakonon, H., Algorithms and Networking for Computer Games, Wiley, July 2006. [NUS LINC]