Architecting Scalability for Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming Experiences (original) (raw)
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MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games) are getting ever more popular, but current game server architectures do not scale with the number of players. Instead of addressing the issue, the most common workaround in the industry is to use multiple distinct and non communicating game servers. After a brief overview of existing game server architectures and methods to distribute server load, this position paper outlines another kind of architecture that should scale and discusses the difficulty of evaluating game platforms on a large scale.
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Modern Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) allow hundreds of thousands of players to interact with a large, dynamic virtual world. Implementing a scalable MMOG service is challenging because the system is subject to high variabilities in the workload, and nevertheless must always operate under very strict QoS requirements. Traditionally, MMOG services are implemented as large dedicated IT infrastructures with aggressive over-provisioning of resources in order to cope with the worst-case workload scenario. In this paper we address the problem of building a large-scale, multi-tier MMOG service using resources provided by a Clo-ud computing infrastructure. The Cloud paradigm allows the service providers to allocate as many resources as they need using a pay as you go model. We harness this paradigm by describing a dynamic provisioning algorithm which can resize the resource pool to adapt to workload variabilities, still maintaining a response time below a user-defined threshold. Our algorithm uses a Queueing Network performance model to quickly evaluate different configurations. Numerical experiments are used to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
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A massively multiplayer online game often deploys dozens or hundreds of servers to support millions of players around the world. A slow response time stemming from an ill-designed network infrastructure could render the game noncompetitive. To establish an efficient infrastructure, the authors focus on selecting host facilities on backbone network nodes, assigning client clusters to these facilities, and determining the required capacity for each host site. An exact solution approach is obtained from solving a minimum cost set-covering problem. The efficiency of the solution approach, in comparison with a greedy heuristic, is also reported.
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A Comparison of Architectures in Massive Multiplayer Online Games
With the development of IT industry and the prosperity of electronic game industry, Massive Multiplayer Online (Role Playing) Games (MMOGs orMMORPGs) are becoming increasingly popular, which simultaneously interact in persistent, virtual, online, multiplayer-only worlds. Various architectural styles are deployed in different MMOGs, each of which is chosen by certain concerns. In this paper we will demonstrate these architectures with their main concerns, and the evaluation and comparisons will give an insight on how to choose a suitable architecture for an MMOG with certain concerns. Furthermore, due to thousands of players involved, we will investigate how these architectures maintain a consistent view on the game state. We will also compare these architectures with respect to performance aspects, such as load distribution, network bandwidth, scalability, etc.
Robust resource allocation in a massive multiplayer online gaming environment
2009
The environment considered in this research is a massive multiplayer online gaming (MMOG) environment. Each user controls an avatar (an image that represents and is manipulated by a user) in a virtual world and interacts with other users. An important aspect of MMOG is maintaining a fair environment among users (i.e., not give an unfair advantage to users with faster connections or more powerful computers). The experience (either positive or negative) the user has with the MMOG environment is dependent on how quickly the game world responds to the user's actions. This study focuses on scaling the system based on demand, while maintaining an environment that guarantees fairness. Consider an environment where there is a main server (MS) that controls the state of the virtual world. If the performance falls below acceptable standards, the MS can off-load calculations to secondary servers (SSs). An SS is a user's computer that is converted into a server. Four heuristics are proposed for determining the number of SSs, which users are converted to SSs, and how users are assigned to the SSs and the MS. The goal of the heuristics is to provide a "fair" environment for all the users, and to be "robust" against the uncertainty of the number of new players that may join a given system configuration. The heuristics are evaluated and compared by simulation.
Enhancing Grids for Massively Multiplayer Online Computer Games
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2008
Massively multiplayer online games (MMOG) is an innovative and challenging class of applications for Grid computing that require large amounts of computational resources for providing a responsive and scalable gameplay for concurrently participating players connected via Internet. We present our Real-Time Framework (RTF)-a Gridbased middleware for scaling game sessions through a variety of parallelization and distribution techniques. RTF is described within a novel multi-layer service-oriented architecture that comprises three advanced services-monitoring, capacity planning, and runtime steering-that use the potential of Grid computing to provide pervasive access to a potentially unbounded number of resources. We report experimental results about the quality of our capacity planning and scalability of the RTF distribution mechanism.
Scalable Resource and QoS Brokering Mechanisms for Massively Multiplayer Online Games
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