Abstract
This paper presents a novel approach to Real-Time-Strategy (RTS) gaming which allows human players as well as machines to compete in a hack-free environment. The main idea is to replace popular but inherently insecure client-side game simulations by a secure server-side game simulation. Only visible parts of the game state are sent to the respective clients. Client-side hacking is therefore impossible and players are free to choose any client software they please. We discuss performance issues arising from server-side simulation and present ORTS – an open RTS game toolkit. This software package provides efficient C++ implementations for 2D object motion and collision detection, visibility computation, and incremental server-client data synchronization, as well as connectivity to the Generic Game Server (GGS). It is therefore well suited as a platform for RTS related A.I. research.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Buro, M.: ORTS project (2002), http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~mburo
Bettner, P., Terrano, M.: 1500 archers on a 28.8: Network programming in Age of Empires and beyond. Gamasutra (2001), http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20010322/terrano_01.htm
Pritchard, M.: How to hurt the hackers: The scoop on Internet cheating and how you can combat it. Gamasutra (2000), http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20000724/pritchard_01.htm
Cohen, J., Lin, M., Manocha, D., Ponamgi, K.: I-Collide: An interactive and exact collision detection system for large-scaled environments. In: ACM International 3D Graphics Conference, pp. 189–196 (1995)
McCreight, E.: Priority search trees. SIAM Journal on Computing 14, 257–276 (1985)
Ziv, J., Lempel, A.: A universal algorithm for sequential data compression. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 23, 337–342 (1977), Implemented for instance in zlib http://www.gzip.org/zlib
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2003 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Buro, M. (2003). ORTS: A Hack-Free RTS Game Environment. In: Schaeffer, J., Müller, M., Björnsson, Y. (eds) Computers and Games. CG 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2883. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-40031-8_19
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-40031-8_19
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-20545-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-40031-8
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive