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P2P games

Networking Middleware and Online-Deployment Mechanisms for Java-Based Games

Jason Rutter - Wed, 06/01/2010 - 12:29
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New entry in Digiplay games research bibliography:

Currently, web-based online gaming applications are predominately utilising Adobe Flash or Java Applets as their core technologies. These games are often casual, two-dimensional games and do not utilise the specialist graphics hardware which has proliferated across modern PCs and Consoles. Multiuser online game play in these titles is often either non-existent or extremely limited. Computer games applications which grace the current generation of consoles and personal computers are designed to utilise the increasingly impressive hardware power at their disposal. However, these are commonly distributed using a physical medium or deployed through Custom, proprietary networking mechanisms and rely upon platform-specific networking APIs to facilitate multi-user online game play. In order to unify the concepts of these disparate styles of gaming, this paper presents two interconnected systems which are implemented using Java Web Start and JXTA P2P technologies, providing a platform-independent framework capable of deploying hardware accelerated cross-platform, cross-browser online-enabled Java games, as part of the Homura Project.

Support for resilient Peer-to-Peer gaming

Jason Rutter - Thu, 23/08/2007 - 06:47
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New entry in Digiplay games research bibliography:

In areas such as Massively-Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), the conventional centralized server model does not scale with the sheer number of simultaneous clients that need to be supported. P2P architectures are increasingly being considered as replacements for traditional client-server architectures in MMOGs. A distributed P2P architecture that uses "Coordinator" nodes for handling smaller groups of players has been shown to be especially effective in supporting MMOGs. However, the drawback of moving from centralized to distributed architectures is the loss of control, and more specifically the increase in the vulnerability of the system as a whole to compromises. There has been no prior work on handling the specific case when the Coordinator itself is compromised and cheats, a scenario akin to cheating conducted by the network. We address this problem by proposing an architecture that is resilient to Coordinator compromises and demonstrate the effectiveness of this architecture. We believe that this is an essential step towards enabling a widespread deployment of P2P-based MMOGs.

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