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Hack-proof Synchronization Protocol for Multi-player Online Games

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Abstract

Modern multi-player online games are popular and attractive because they provide a sense of virtual world experience to users: players can interact with each other on the Internet but perceive a local area network responsiveness. To make this possible, most modern multi-player online games use similar networking architecture that aims to hide the effects of network latency, packet loss, and high variance of delay from players. Because real-time interactivity is a crucial feature from a player’s point of view, any delay perceived by a player can affect his/her performance [16]. Therefore, the game client must be able to run and accept new user commands continuously regardless of the condition of the underlying communication channel, and that it will not stop responding because of waiting for update packets from other players. To make this possible, multi-player online games typically use protocols based on “dead-reckoning” [5, 6, 9] which allows loose synchronization between players.

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Correspondence to John C.S. Lui .

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Fung, Y.S., Lui, J.C. (2009). Hack-proof Synchronization Protocol for Multi-player Online Games. In: Furht, B. (eds) Handbook of Multimedia for Digital Entertainment and Arts. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-89024-1_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-89024-1_11

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