Peer-to-Peer Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming

Screenshot of the prototype game Planet Pi4

Why Computer Games?

"Computer games are kids' stuff" may be still in the minds of many people. But the computer games industry is far beyond infancy – worldwide sales have overtaken even the movie industry. This success inspires even the big players in the computer industry as well as research institutes and universites.

Why Massively Multiplayer Online Games?

Since the Internet has become a part of everyday life, online playing functionality has become prevalent in computer games. More than eight million players worldwide spend their time with games that cannot be played offline – so called Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs). This kind of games provides vast virtual worlds, where the virtual avatars of thousands of players can meet and interact in realtime. These worlds are persistent which means that their existence is not restricted to the game session of a particular player. Instead, players can enter and leave the world whenever they like to. Virtual life goes on even if they are offline. The world itself may exist for years, allowing long-term development of virtual societies and economics.

From a research perspective MMOG can be seen as distributed event systems with real-time requirements. Most game events have to be delivered within strict deadlines to avoid a negative impact on the players' experience. We are thus looking at MMOG as prototypical distributed real-time systems to develop and analyze peer-to-peer machanisms supporting those systems.

Planet Pi4

Planet Pi4 (Fig. 1) is the research prototype game developed in the context of the DFG research group QuaP2P. Its gameplay combines the elements of a first person shooter with MMOG aspects. Shooter games are very sensitive to latency, while MMOGs need to be very scalable. These two aspects make Planet Pi4 in interesting subject for peer-to-peer research. Planet Pi4 is specifically designed to run both as a stand-alone version on a real network and in a discrete-event simulator. This allows for an evaluation of the peer-to-peer machanisms in a real environment with real players as well in a strictly controlled and repeatable simulated environment.

Publications

On synthetic workloads for multiplayer online games: a methodology for generating representative shooter game workloads
Max Lehn, Tonio Triebel, Robert Rehner, Benjamin Guthier, Stephan Kopf, Alejandro Buchmann, Wolfgang Effelsberg
Multimedia Systems (MMSJ), ISSN 0942-4962, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, February 2014
The final publication is available at http://link.springer.com
[Journal] [PDF] [BibTeX]
 
Application Benchmarks for Peer-to-Peer Systems: Peer-to-Peer Overlays for Online Games
Max Lehn, Christian Groß, Tonio Triebel
In Wolfgang Effelsberg, Ralf Steinmetz, Thorsten Strufe: Benchmarking Peer-to-Peer Systems, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 7847, Springer, 2013
[BibTeX]
 
Distributed Optimization of Event Dissemination Exploiting Interest Clustering
Max Lehn, Robert Rehner, Alejandro Buchmann
Proceedings of the 38th Annual IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN'13), 2013
[Conference] [PDF] [Slides] [BibTeX]
 
Generation of Synthetic Workloads for Multiplayer Online Gaming Benchmarks
Tonio Triebel, Max Lehn, Robert Rehner, Benjamin Guthier, Stephan Kopf, Wolfgang Effelsberg
International Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games (NetGames'12), Venice, Italy, IEEE, November 2012
[Conference] [PDF] [BibTeX]
 
Towards a Comparative Performance Evaluation of Overlays for Networked Virtual Environments
Christian Groß, Max Lehn, Christoph Münker, Alejandro Buchmann, Ralf Steinmetz
Proceedings of the 11th IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing, IEEE, September 2011
[PDF] [BibTeX]
 
An Online Gaming Testbed for Peer-to-Peer Architectures
Max Lehn, Christof Leng, Robert Rehner, Tonio Triebel, Alejandro Buchmann
Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM'11, Toronto, Canada, ACM, August 2011
Demo
[Conference] [PDF] [PS] [Slides] [BibTeX]
 
Designing Benchmarks for P2P Systems
Max Lehn, Tonio Triebel, Christian Gross, Dominik Stingl, Karsten Saller, Wolfgang Effelsberg, Alexandra Kovacevic, Ralf Steinmetz
In Kai Sachs, Ilia Petrov, Pablo Guerrero: From Active Data Management to Event-Based Systems and More, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 6462, ISBN 978-3-642-17225-0, Springer, November 2010
[PDF] [BibTeX]
 
Performance Evaluation of Peer-to-Peer Gaming Overlays
Max Lehn, Tonio Triebel, Christof Leng, Alejandro Buchmann, Wolfgang Effelsberg
IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing, August 2010
Demo
[Conference] [PDF] [BibTeX]
 
pSense - Maintaining a dynamic localized peer-to-peer structure for position based multicast in games
Arne Schmieg, Michael Stieler, Sebastian Jeckel, Bettina Kabus Patric Kemme, Alejandro Buchmann
Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing 2008 (P2P 2008), Aachen, Germany, September 2008
[Conference] [PDF] [BibTeX]
 
Area-based gossip multicast
Christian Seeger, Bettina Kemme, Patric Kabus, Alejandro Buchmann
NetGames '08: Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Network and System Support for Games, Worcester, Massachusetts, ISBN 978-1-60558-132-3, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2008
[PDF] [BibTeX]
 
A Framework for Network-Agnostic Multiplayer Games
Patric Kabus, Alejandro Buchmann
EUROSIS GAME-ON International Conference on Intelligent Games and Simulation 2007, 2007
[BibTeX]
 
Addressing Cheating in Distributed Massively Multiplayer Online Games
Patric Kabus, Wesley Terpstra, Mariano Cilia, Alejandro Buchmann
International Workshop on NetGames (NetGames'05), October 2005
[Conference] [PDF] [BibTeX]
 
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