skip to main content
10.1145/1536513.1536566acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesfdgConference Proceedingsconference-collections
poster

Mammoth: a massively multiplayer game research framework

Published: 26 April 2009 Publication History

Abstract

This paper presents Mammoth, a massively multiplayer game research framework designed for experimentation in an academic setting. Mammoth provides a modular architecture where different components, such as the network engine, the replication engine, or interest management, can easily be replaced. Subgames allow a researcher to define different game goals, for instance, in order to evaluate the effects of different team-play tactics on the game performance. Mammoth also offers a modular and flexible infrastructure for the definition of non-player characters with behavior controlled by complex artificial intelligence algorithms. This paper focuses on the Mammoth architecture, demonstrating how good design practices can be used to create a modular framework where researchers from different research domains can conduct their experiments. The effectiveness of the architecture is demonstrated by several successful research projects accomplished using the Mammoth framework.

References

[1]
Mammoth: A Massively Multiplayer Game Research Framework. http://mammoth.cs.mcgill.ca/.
[2]
Ogre: Open source 3d graphics engine. http://www.ogre3d.org/, 2001.
[3]
Quazal Technologies Inc., duplication spaces patent # 6,907,471, DDL patent # 7,096,453. http://www.quazal.com, 2008.
[4]
A. Bharambe, J. Pang, and S. Seshan. Colyseus: a distributed architecture for online multiplayer games. In NSDI'06: Proceedings of the 3rd Symposium on Networked Systems Design & Implementation, pages 155--168, Berkeley, CA, USA, 2006. USENIX Association.
[5]
J.-S. Boulanger, J. Kienzle, and C. Verbrugge. Comparing Interest Management Algorithms for Massively Multiplayer Games. In Proceedings of Netgames 2006: 5th Workshop on Network and System Support for Games, pages 1--12, October 2006.
[6]
M. Buro. ORTS: a hack-free RTS game environment. In International Computers and Games Conference (CG'02), Edmonton, Canada, 2002.
[7]
R. Coleman, S. Roebke, and L. Grayson. Gedi: a game engine for teaching videogame design and programming. J. Comput. Small Coll., 21(2):72--82, 2005.
[8]
M. Conway, S. Audia, T. Burnette, D. Cosgrove, and K. Christiansen. Alice: lessons learned from building a 3D system for novices. In CHI '00: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, pages 486--493, New York, NY, USA, 2000. ACM.
[9]
A. Denault, J. Kienzle, C. Dionne, and C. Verbrugge. Object-Oriented Network Middleware for Massively Multiplayer Online Games. Technical report, McGill University, Montreal, Canada.
[10]
R. D. S. Fletcher, T. C. N. Graham, and C. Wolfe. Plug-replaceable consistency maintenance for multiplayer games. In NetGames '06, page 34, New York, NY, USA, 2006. ACM.
[11]
E. Gamma, R. Helm, R. Johnson, and J. Vlissides. Design Patterns. Addison Wesley, Reading, MA, USA, 1995.
[12]
F. Glinka, A. Ploß, J. Müller-Iden, and S. Gorlatch. RTF: a real-time framework for developing scalable multiplayer online games. In NetGames '07, pages 81--86, New York, NY, USA, 2007. ACM.
[13]
M. A. Hawker. Subgames in Massively Multiplayer Online Games. Master's thesis, School of Computer Science, McGill University, Montreal, Canada, June 2008.
[14]
T.-Y. Hsiao and S.-M. Yuan. Practical middleware for massively multiplayer online games. IEEE Internet Computing, 9(5):47--54, 2005.
[15]
M. Lanctot, N. N. M. Sun, and C. Verbrugge. Path-finding for large scale multiplayer computer games. In Proceedings of the 2nd Annual North American Game-On Conference (Game On'NA 2006), pages 26--33, Monterey, California, sept 2006. Eurosis.
[16]
D. Lee, M. Lim, S. Han, and K. Lee. ATLAS: a scalable network framework for distributed virtual environments. Presence: Teleoper. Virtual Environ, 16(2):125--156, 2007.
[17]
D. Liang and P. Boustead. Using local lag and timewarp to improve performance for real life multi-player online games. In NetGames '06, page 37, New York, NY, USA, 2006. ACM.
[18]
I. Parberry, J. R. Nunn, J. Scheinberg, E. Carson, and J. Cole. SAGE: a simple academic game engine. In Proceedings of the Second Annual Microsoft Academic Days on Game Development in Computer Science Education, pages 90--94, 2007. http://larc.csci.unt.edu/sage/.
[19]
M. J. Ponsen, S. Lee-Urban, H. Muñoz-Avila, D. W. Aha, and M. Molineaux. Stratagus: An open-source game engine for research in real-time strategy games. Technical Report AIC-05-12, Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence, 2005.
[20]
M. Powell. JMonkey Engine. http://www.jmonkeyengine.com/.
[21]
J. Schaback. Feng GUI: Java GUIs with OpenGL. http://www.fenggui.org/.
[22]
Sun Microsystems. Java Binding to OpenGL. http://jogl.dev.java.net/.
[23]
J. Voigt. DXFramework: A pedagogical computer game engine library. http://dxframework.org/, 2006.
[24]
S. D. Webb, W. Lau, and S. Soh. NGS: an application layer network game simulator. In IE '06: Proceedings of the 3rd Australasian conference on Interactive entertainment, pages 15--22, 2006.
[25]
K. Zhang, B. Kemme, and A. Denault. Persistence in massively multiplayer online games. In NetGames '08, pages 1--10, New York, NY, USA, 2008. ACM.

Cited By

View all

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences
FDG '09: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Foundations of Digital Games
April 2009
386 pages
ISBN:9781605584379
DOI:10.1145/1536513
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]

Sponsors

  • SASDG: The Society for the Advancement of the Science of Digital Games

In-Cooperation

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 26 April 2009

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Qualifiers

  • Poster

Conference

FDG '09
Sponsor:
  • SASDG

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 152 of 415 submissions, 37%

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)8
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1
Reflects downloads up to 01 Mar 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Peer-to-Peer GamingEncyclopedia of Computer Graphics and Games10.1007/978-3-031-23161-2_238(1341-1344)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2024
  • (2022)Transactions in Massively Multiplayer Online GamesEncyclopedia of Big Data Technologies10.1007/978-3-319-63962-8_184-2(1-7)Online publication date: 24-May-2022
  • (2019)Transactions in Massively Multiplayer Online GamesEncyclopedia of Big Data Technologies10.1007/978-3-319-77525-8_184(1712-1718)Online publication date: 20-Feb-2019
  • (2019)Peer-to-Peer GamingEncyclopedia of Computer Graphics and Games10.1007/978-3-319-08234-9_238-1(1-5)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2019
  • (2018)FiVESThe Visual Computer: International Journal of Computer Graphics10.1007/s00371-018-1564-034:9(1269-1282)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2018
  • (2018)Transactions in Massively Multiplayer Online GamesEncyclopedia of Big Data Technologies10.1007/978-3-319-63962-8_184-1(1-7)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2018
  • (2017)Self-Evolving Subscriptions for Content-Based Publish/Subscribe Systems2017 IEEE 37th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS)10.1109/ICDCS.2017.277(1597-1607)Online publication date: Jun-2017
  • (2017)MultiPub: Latency and Cost-Aware Global-Scale Cloud Publish/Subscribe2017 IEEE 37th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS)10.1109/ICDCS.2017.203(2075-2082)Online publication date: Jun-2017
  • (2017)FiVES: An Aspect-Oriented Virtual Environment Server2017 International Conference on Cyberworlds (CW)10.1109/CW.2017.15(103-110)Online publication date: Sep-2017
  • (2016)A video games technologies courseProceedings of the 37th Annual Conference of the European Association for Computer Graphics: Education Papers10.5555/3059068.3059077(45-48)Online publication date: 9-May-2016
  • Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media