OnLive

OnLive appeared in our newsfeed again. They’ve been through a financial restructuring but are still alive and kicking and have continued to provide good gaming service. Perhaps their timing was wrong, perhaps with the next generation consoles being announced in the next couple of months, they may be superseded or have more direct competitors (what has …

999 Player FPS

The world record for number of players in a single game shard (and visible to each other!) has been officially broken (official meaning that Guinness World Records has verified it)! Man vs Machine browser-based FPS prototype developed by MuchDifferent supported a one-off event of 999 players. The event was made possible by their custom server backend, Pikkoserver. The client …

SIGGRAPH Asia 2011

This course was given at SIGGRAPH Asia 2011. It was a four hour course at quite a rapid pace. Session 1: 9:00-10:45 09:00-09:30 Anthony Steed: Overview & Introduction 09:30-10.00 Anthony Steed: Requirements and Constraints 10.00–10.45 Anthony Steed: Latency Session 2: 11:00-12:45 11:00-11:45 Anthony Steed: Bandwidth Management & Scalability 11:45-12:15 Anthony Steed: Application Support & Recent …

Chapter 3

Elsevier/Morgan Kaufman made available Chapter 3 of the book as a sample chapter. This chapter gives a relatively brief introduction to the Internet and the protocols of the TCP/IP stack. Its excellent background reading if you are attending one of our courses.

Networking for the Web

There is an interesting article in CSCW2011 this year about the performance of different technologies for communicating with servers from within a web browser: Carl A. Gutwin, Michael Lippold, and T. C. Nicholas Graham. 2011. Real-time groupware in the browser: testing the performance of web-based networking. In Proceedings of the ACM 2011 conference on Computer supported …

GDC Vault

Our last couple of posts were about two talks from GDC 2011. The GDC Vault contains hundreds of talks on all aspects of video game development. The talk slides are usually free. Members can access videos of the presentations, though some of those are free too. Here are a few more that are networking related: GDC2011: Large-scale Messaging …

Dead Rising 2

1000s of Zombies, 1000s of Problems: The Dead Rising 2 Multiplayer Experience by Dee Jay Randall Another interesting talk from GDC 2011. Dead Rising 2 is excellent fun: you get to mangle zombies in lots of different ways. It supports a two player co-operative mode. Just because of the nature of the game with thousands of potentially …

Halo: Reach

I Shot You First Bungie’s Halo Reach by David Aldridge at GDC 2001 The talk is fascinating and has several videos to illustrate situations and tools (it is thus a very large download at 542MB!). David was lead network engineer on this project. There are lots of interesting insights on practical use of scalability techniques. As is common for modern FPS …