In this year's lab course, we explore peer-to-peer mechanisms for state management in multiplayer online games. The virtual worlds of such games typically contain lots of objects, each having its own (modifiable) state. With the peer-to-peer approach, the game state is not managed centrally on a server, but distributed and replicated over all participating peers, avoiding the central single point of failure.

The peer-to-peer approach, however, has several challenges, such as:

• concurrent access to state,
• leaving and failing peers (churn),
• unbalanced load, and others.

The goal of this lab course is to design, implement and evaluate peer-to-peer mechanisms for multiplayer online game state management. We will use a simple game for the prototypical implementation and evaluation.

Some the relevant issues are:

• agreement
• backup and failover
• load balancing
• scalability

Meetings and Slides

Initial Meeting	25.04., 9:50-11:30, E203	Introduction & Organization	Slides (PDF)
Phase 1	02.05., 9:50-11:30, E202	Game concept, initial implementation	Slides (PDF)
Phase 2	16.05., 9:50-11:30, E202	Region Management	Slides (PDF)
Phase 3	06.06., 9:50-11:30, E202
Phase 4	20.06., 9:50-11:30, E202
Phase 5	04.07., 9:50-11:30, E202
Phase 6	18.07., 9:50-11:30, E202
Final Presentation	01.08., 9:50-11:30, E202

Registration

Please register via TUCaN or write us an email.

Prerequisites

• Programming in Java or C++
• Creativity
• Willingness to work in a team

Goals

• Understanding the concept of peer-to-peer computing
• Implementing and testing large-scale network applications
• Successfully work in a team

Language

The lab will be held in English. All students' presentations and texts can either be in English or German (English preferred).