Remember, Chris GauthierDickey is talking about his p2p game
architecture THIS SATURDAY. Be there or be the thing that Cory liked.
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 Kbob
kbobsoft software consulting
http://kbobsoft.com [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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