Massive Multiplayer Online Games
The project group Massive Multiplayer Online Games deals with the architecture
of online games with a great number of players. Within the scope of this project,
an arcitecture will be designed, which meets the requirements of such games
with qualified concepts, and serves as a basis for other software systems with similar
demands, e.g. CSCW systems.
Traditional multiplayer games depend on a client-server architecture, where
a single server hosts the game world and the players within and stores the data persistently.
When hosting a big number of players (several thousands), the capacity of a single server is strained or exceeded, so the load must be distributed between several servers.
To deal with the dependencies of massive multiplayer games, it is vital to distribute the world and its players onto several systems. An approach to
such a system would be a peer-to-peer network, where each participant is a client
and server simultaniously, while providing memory capacity, computing power and bandwidth
to the whole system. An architecture like that would provide an easy, scalable basis for future online games.
The architecture should primarily serve as a base for a massive multiplayer online game,
which will be a proof-of-concept application, but we also hope to get an
architecture capable of building a basis for other massive user based
software systems, like Computer Supported Collaborative Work Systems(CSCW).
CSCW-systems face similar problems when they host a big number of users, who want
do cooperative work on shared data.
The Architecture
|
|
