About CS4344

• Who: Ooi Wei Tsang (ooiwt)
• Where: SR2 (COM1 #02-04)
• When: Mon 1000-1200
• Workload: Lecture (2hr) Preparation (2hr) Homework (6hr) per week
• CA: Open Book Exam (35%) Assignments (40%) Quizzes/Midterm (25%)
• Objective: This module aims at providing students with a deep understanding of various technical issues pertaining to the development of networked games and mobile games. Students will be exposed to concepts from distributed systems, operating systems, security and cryptography, networking and embedded systems. In particular, issues such as game server architectures (mirrored, centralised, peer-to-peer etc.), consistency management (bucket synchronisation, dead reckoning etc.), interest management, scalability to large number of clients (C10K problem), cheat prevention and detection, and power management will be discussed.

Topics

• Communication architecture of networked games
• Synchronization protocols/consistency maintenance
• Interest management
• Scalability issues
• Cheat prevention and detection
• Case studies

Reference Books

• Networking and Online Games: Understanding and Engineering Multiplayer Internet Games
  Grenville Armitage, Mark Claypool, Philip Branch
  ISBN: 978-0-470-01857-6, Hardcover, 232 pages, June 2006
  [NUS LINC]
• Algorithms and Networking for Computer Games
  Jouni Smed, Harri Hakonen
  ISBN: 978-0-470-01812-5, Hardcover, 286 pages, July 2006
  [NUS LINC]

Related Courses (Elsewhere)

• COMP 521 Modern Computer Games at McGill University
• CSC337 Computer Games Development at Newcastle University
• CS5961 Networked Game Design at University of Utah
• CS679 Computer Game Technology at University of Wisconsin
• TKO 5725 Multiplayer Computer Games at University of Turku, Finland.