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Synchronization medium: a consistency maintenance component for mobile multiplayer games

Published: 19 September 2007 Publication History

Abstract

In multiplayer games, where many players take part in a game while communicating through a network, the players may have an inconsistent view of the game world because of the communication delays across the network. This problem of inconsistency is even more crucial when playing on a mobile phone via a 3G network where the communication delays can be of several seconds. Consistency maintenance algorithms must be used to have a uniform view of the game world. These algorithms are very complex and hard to program. In this paper, we discuss different consistency maintenance algorithms from the point of view of mobile devices and present an approach where the consistency concern is handled separately by a distributed component called synchronization medium, which is responsible for communication as well as consistency maintenance. The game logic components interact with the synchronization medium to communicate between them and synchronize their data. We argue that this separation of concerns reduces the burden on the game developer. Moreover, a medium offers a generic interface and is designed to be easily reused for different game applications. Finally, using a medium, different consistency maintenance approaches can be tested and compared easily for experimentation.

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cover image ACM Conferences
NetGames '07: Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Network and system support for games
September 2007
138 pages
ISBN:9780980446005
DOI:10.1145/1326257
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: 19 September 2007

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Author Tags

  1. communication abstraction
  2. data synchronization
  3. latency hiding
  4. medium
  5. multiplayer mobile games

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Cited By

View all
  • (2020)A Study on Design Requirement Development and Satisfaction for Future Virtual World SystemsFuture Internet10.3390/fi1207011212:7(112)Online publication date: 6-Jul-2020
  • (2014)Mobile self-management guide for young men with mild hemophilia in cases of minor injuriesNetwork Modeling Analysis in Health Informatics and Bioinformatics10.1007/s13721-014-0064-z3:1Online publication date: 8-Jul-2014
  • (2011)Back to the futureProceedings of the ACM 2011 conference on Computer supported cooperative work10.1145/1958824.1958852(187-196)Online publication date: 19-Mar-2011
  • (2010)Adaptable client-server architecture for mobile multiplayer gamesProceedings of the 3rd International ICST Conference on Simulation Tools and Techniques10.4108/ICST.SIMUTOOLS2010.8704(1-7)Online publication date: 15-Mar-2010
  • (2010)A session server architecture for mobile distributed virtual environmentsProceedings of the 12th International Conference on Information Integration and Web-based Applications & Services10.1145/1967486.1967611(772-775)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2010
  • (2008)A dynamic approach to consistency management for mobile multiplayer gamesProceedings of the 8th international conference on New technologies in distributed systems10.1145/1416729.1416783(1-6)Online publication date: 23-Jun-2008

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