Title
Comparing interest management algorithms for massively multiplayer games
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.
Year
DOI
Venue
2006
10.1145/1230040.1230069
NetGames
Keywords
Field
DocType
approximate ideal visibility-based interest,computationally inexpensive tile-based interest,adaptive interest management technique,computer-controlled player,management algorithm,interest management algorithm,multiplayer games increase,different interest management,multiplayer game,sophisticated interest management technique
Interest management,Broadcasting,Visibility,Game mechanics,Simulation,Computer science,Algorithm,Multimedia,Multiplayer game,Distributed computing
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
1-59593-589-4
60
2.76
References 
Authors
12
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jean-Sébastien Boulanger1602.76
Jörg Kienzle273269.38
Clark Verbrugge341139.15