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On correctness of scalable multi-server state replication in online games

Published: 30 October 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG) require novel, scalable network architectures for a high amount of participating players in huge game worlds. Consequently, new and complex multi-server parallelization approaches have been proposed to provide responsive, massively multiplayer gameplay for different game genres. Besides scalability and performance, the issue of correctness of the game state processing is vital for providing a failure-free gameplay as expected by the users. In this paper, we first introduce the concept of correctness for multi-server replication architectures as the ability to preserve the order of user inputs in the virtual processing. We then present two correctness mechanisms optimized for multi-server replication: pessimistic lag and optimistic timewarp. We experimentally show that by implementing the lag mechanism for correctness in our multi-server implementation of the QFusion/Quake2-game the amount of incorrectly ordered actions can be reduced from 50% to 10%.

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  • (2012)Dynamic resource allocation for MMOGs in cloud computing environments2012 8th International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC)10.1109/IWCMC.2012.6314192(142-146)Online publication date: Aug-2012
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  • (2011)The Client Assignment Problem for Continuous Distributed Interactive ApplicationsProceedings of the 2011 31st International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems10.1109/ICDCS.2011.24(203-214)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2011
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cover image ACM Conferences
NetGames '06: Proceedings of 5th ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Network and system support for games
October 2006
350 pages
ISBN:1595935894
DOI:10.1145/1230040
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 30 October 2006

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Cited By

View all
  • (2012)Dynamic resource allocation for MMOGs in cloud computing environments2012 8th International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC)10.1109/IWCMC.2012.6314192(142-146)Online publication date: Aug-2012
  • (2011)Improving the concurrent updates of replicated global objects in multi-server virtual environmentsProceedings of the 4th International ICST Conference on Simulation Tools and Techniques10.5555/2151054.2151111(320-327)Online publication date: 21-Mar-2011
  • (2011)The Client Assignment Problem for Continuous Distributed Interactive ApplicationsProceedings of the 2011 31st International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems10.1109/ICDCS.2011.24(203-214)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2011
  • (2010)A protocol for distributed collision detectionProceedings of the 9th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games10.5555/1944796.1944802(1-6)Online publication date: 16-Nov-2010
  • (2010)Database and State Replication in Multiplayer Online GamesProceedings of the 2010 IEEE 24th International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications Workshops10.1109/WAINA.2010.169(1059-1064)Online publication date: 20-Apr-2010
  • (2010)A protocol for distributed collision detection2010 9th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games10.1109/NETGAMES.2010.5680187(1-6)Online publication date: Nov-2010
  • (2007)Spatial Awareness of Digital ArtefactsProceedings of the 11th IEEE International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real-Time Applications10.1109/DS-RT.2007.41(3-4)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2007
  • (2007)An Evaluation of Push-Pull Algorithms in Support of Cell-Based Interest ManagementProceedings of the 11th IEEE International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real-Time Applications10.1109/DS-RT.2007.13(39-47)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2007

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