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Comparing interest management algorithms for massively multiplayer games

Published: 30 October 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Broadcasting all state changes to every player of a massively multiplayer game is not a viable solution. To successfully overcome the challenge of scale, massively multiplayer games have to employ sophisticated interest management techniques that only send relevant state changes to each player. This paper compares the performance of different interest management algorithms based on measurements obtained in a real massively multiplayer game using human and computer-generated player actions. We show that interest management algorithms that take into account obstacles in the world reduce the number of update messages between players by up to a factor of 6, and that some computationally inexpensive tile-based interest management algorithms can approximate ideal visibility-based interest management at very low cost. The experiments also show that measurements obtained with computer-controlled players performing random actions can approximate measurements of games played by real humans, provided that the starting positions of the random players are chosen adequately. As the size of the world and the number of players of massively multiplayer games increases, adaptive interest management techniques such as the ones studied in this paper will become increasingly important.

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cover image ACM Conferences
NetGames '06: Proceedings of 5th ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Network and system support for games
October 2006
350 pages
ISBN:1595935894
DOI:10.1145/1230040
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: 30 October 2006

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Author Tags

  1. computer games
  2. distributed games
  3. interest management

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  • (2021)An Action-Aware Combat Model for Efficient Video Compression of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games on Cloud Gaming Platforms2021 IEEE 23rd International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP)10.1109/MMSP53017.2021.9733496(1-6)Online publication date: 6-Oct-2021
  • (2021)Dyconits: Scaling Minecraft-like Services through Dynamically Managed Inconsistency2021 IEEE 41st International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS)10.1109/ICDCS51616.2021.00021(126-137)Online publication date: Jul-2021
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