What: Fully Distributed Peer to Peer Game Architecture Who: Chris GauthierDickey When: Saturday, December 13, 1:00 Where: EFN, 43 W. Broadway, Eugene
For years, the game industry has used a client/server architecture for delivering massively-multiplayer online games to players. This architecture has the advantage that a single authority orders events, resolves conflicts in the simulation, acts as a central repository for data, and is easy to secure. On the other hand, it has several disadvantages. First, it introduces delay between players because messages are always forwarded through the server. Second, localized congestion around the server increases with the number of players. Last, the game's complexity is limited by the computational power of the server. One local game company stated that their total bandwidth requirements were equivalent to the entire City of Eugene's telephone bandwidth just to deploy their MMOG. While we can throw technology at most of these problems in the form of more servers and higher bandwidth lines, this solution incurs significant costs. To address these problems, we are developing a fully distributed, peer-to-peer architecture for MMOGs. With a fully distributed architecture, messages can be sent directly to other players, thereby reducing delay and local congestion. Players can start their own MMOGs without the massive investment in resources required by the client/server architecture. Furthermore, every machine connected to the game can contribute cycles to the overall simulation, overcoming the bottleneck of computation that servers and clusters have. However, the fundamental problem with a distributed game is trust. How can we trust players to accurately represent when a given event has occurred? Accordingly, the first component we have designed for this architecture is the New-Event Ordering (NEO) protocol, which orders events while ensuring trust. We have designed NEO to be cheat-proof at the network level, allowing us to build peer-to-peer networks that are trustworthy but still retain the latency requirements of real-time, interactive games. NEO represents a major step forward in distributed communication protocols for games and we will be using it to design the rest of the communication architecture so that we may finally realize fully distributed MMOGs. ============================================================================== Check out this presentation and other EUGLUG activities at our web site. http://www.euglug.org/ -- Bob Miller K<bob> kbobsoft software consulting http://kbobsoft.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ EuG-LUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug