We recently came across an interesting article on IMVU’s engineering blog. That blog is well worth following if you are interested in collaborative virtual environments: IMVU is one of the better social platforms and it constantly involves. They also give back to the open source community (notably through their contributions to Cal3D). Anyway, the recent article …
Author archives: Anthony
IEEE VR 2011 Course Finished
We had a successful course at IEEE Virtual Reality 2011 in Singapore. All the materials from the course are now online. Please let us know if you use them.
Unity & Middleware
Prompted by an earlier post about FPS size, we took a brief look at the state of networking in Unity (Pikkotech 1000 player FPS demo uses Unity). Unity has gathered a lot of momentum recently, it is the game engine of choice for our students at the moment. Unity has used RakNet for a while for their …
Who has the biggest FPS?
FPS games involve frenetic real-time interaction which is why the games are often limited in the number of players that they can support. For peer to peer games, we are (probably) limited by the bandwidth in to the peers. For client-server games, we are limited by the bandwidth in to the server. For both cases, there is a potential O(N2) …
IEEE VR 2011 Course
This was a full day course 20th on March 2011 at IEEE Virtual Reality 2011, in Singapore. The course was given by Anthony Steed. Manuel Fradinho Oliveira assisted in the preparation of some of the materials. Abstract Our course will introduce attendees to best practice and recent advances in the networking of graphics applications. We take a …
Netgames 2010
The full programme for Netgames 2010 (Taipei, Taiwan, 16-17th November 2010) is online. Netgames is the main conferences that covers issues related to Networked Graphics. Some papers that looking intriguing are: The Near-Term Feasibility of P2P MMOG’s John L. Miller (Microsoft Research & University of Cambridge, United Kingdom) Jon Crowcroft (University of Cambridge, United Kingdom) A Protocol …
Bandwidth Aid
An article by Vinod Tandon in last month’s Develop magazine (September 2010), discusses bandwidth issues from the perspective of someone working within SCEA’s Online Technology Group. Unfortunately the online version of the article only shows the first two out of three pages. This is a very basic discussion of some techniques to reduce bandwidth, including network topology …
Packet Flight
Packet Flight is a fun system for visualizing network traffic. There are some example videos here, and the source code is available on github.
EVE Online Architecture
CCP Games have a very interesting set of articles on their developer blog about how they tackle lag in EVE Online. EVE Online is interesting in that they claim that the world isn’t sharded, but its not the case that any player can interact instantaneously with any other player with the full game mechanics (i.e. ship to …
Initial Slides
We have done a first pass at slides for the book, including all the figures and tables. If you use these for a course, please let us know. Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13