- Ubiqby AnthonyAfter several years of using standard libraries for networking for our social VR and other networking needs (usually in Unity), the Covid pandemic and the need to work outside the laboratory motivated us to make templates and libraries that simplified the construction of collaborative VR demos. This was used in teaching and now is open-source …
- Second Editionby AnthonyWe are planning a second edition of the book and are very happy to hear suggestions of types of new material that readers would like to see in the book. Anthony
- Link Dropby AnthonySome recent links and blog posts that will be of interest to networking engineers in games & VR: Please stop writing new serialization protocols – XDR exists and if you can use it, you should LawBreakers Dev Diary #7 | Netcode & Replication – this short videos has some nice visualisations of client-side prediction contrasting with server-side …
- Project Sansarby AnthonySecondLife from Linden Labs has been one of the most successful shared virtual environment platforms. Although not the first by any means, it has attracted many users. At UCL we have used it for various purposes over the years. SecondLife was architected in a period when the performance of the target computers was considerably lower. In particular, the graphics …
- NvidiaGridby AnthonyNot to be outdone by AMD, Nvidia also has a cloud gaming solution, NVidia GridTM. NVidia’s site obviously got more scrutiny from the marketing department. Unsurprisingly there are new cards, with the GRID K340 supporting 4-24 players on 5 GK107 GPUs. The website suggests that this means 24 720p30 H-264 streams can be encoded by this …
- AWS 3Dby AnthonyDefinitely of interest to several projects that I’ve been involved in recently: since November 2013 Amazon Web Services has been offering a G2 instance type that comes with the NVidia GRID cards. Now to try to persuade some local students that they don’t need to buy new graphics cards, but can do their testing online. $0.702 …
- FlappyMMOby AnthonyPerhaps the Flappy Bird phenomena has died down, certainly my high score of 8 is probably never going to improve. However, just for amusement, possibly the simplest ever MMO FlapMMO is still around and still demonstrating that everyone finds the game hard (29% casualties on the first obstacle right now!). Possibly a coursework assignment for next year …
- RapidFireby AnthonyAMD has announced a series of new cards specifically for cloud gaming, the AMD RadeonTM Sky Series. These cards are optimised to host up to six games at 720p/30Hz, and provide low-latency throughput. The video coding is apparently done on the GPU itself. The secret bit is the AMD RapidFire technology, but its the type of marketing …
- Protocols and World of Warcraftby AnthonyLooking through the talks from the Game Developer Conference 2013, aside from the new excitement about virtual reality (again) and several talks about cloud computing, there was this very technical talk by Joe Rumsey from Blizzard Entertainment about Network Serialization and Routing in World of Warcraft. Slides available from his blog. This talk goes through the issues …
- PS4 and Gaikaiby AnthonyWe are gearing up for a new round of consoles, with PS4 being announced and XBox 720 widely rumoured. Friends in the games industry are very excited about the new platforms. Whilst some people were disappointed in the PS4 announcement because they didn’t see final hardware, one very disruptive feature that is announced is the integration with …
- Web3D 2013by AnthonyThe deadline for Web3D 2013 is now approaching (Feb 15th). It will be in Spain this year in June, which should be very pleasant.
- EVE Online 3000 player battleby AnthonyThere a few interesting stories about a recent 3000 player battle that took part in Eve Online. PC Gamer give a broad overview about what happened, which seems to stem from a mis-click by a player (UI lessons to be learned here I expect!). They have a very impressive video of part of the battle. Loses on …
- Net Games 2012by AnthonyThe program for Net Games 2012 is up.
- 3D Repoby AnthonyOne of the EngD students in our group has a very interesting project related to networked graphics: 3D Repo. 3D Repo is an online repository for storing, retrieving and versioning large 3D models. Although its not for real-time scene edits (at the moment), it is very suitable for storing world models for collaborative virtual environments, or …
- Web3D 2012by AnthonyThe annual ACM Web3D Conference is one of the main venues for new networked graphics research each year. Its focus is on more integrative web technologies rather than low-level protocols, but still there is always good work on system architecture to look at. Some of the ones that piqued our interest are (links to ACM DL coming): …
- FPS Playersby AnthonyHas the record for number of players in a first-person game been broken? The team behind Just Cause 2 Multiplayer an unofficial mod of Just Cause 2 have been beta testing their server. It recently peaked at 1300 players online. Just Cause 2 is in a more open world than many FPSs, but the numbers of players supported are …
- RakNet Open Sourceby AnthonyVery good news: RakNet is now Open Source (modified BSD license). RakNet has a very broad spectrum of facilities that you need to build your networked graphics system. We used RakNet in the examples in the book (though they need minor updates which we will try to do in the next couple of weeks). Unfortunately we had had to stop …
- Chinese Translationby AnthonyOur book was translated into Chinese by Tsinghua University Press. Amazon CN listing here.
- Internet Visualisationsby AnthonyA couple of Internet infographics have been sent my way. They are good material for introductory talks for the area! Evolution of the Web visualises changing web technology. Its useful for tracking various standards that are coming our way. From Jen Rhee, a visualisation of the traffic in a day on the Internet
- GDC 2012by AnthonyAnother slew of networking papers from this year’s GDC, see GDC Vault. The first of these is particularly interesting: a study of the networking required for the Gears of Wars 3 launch: Dedicated Servers in Gears of War 3 Scaling to Millions of Players, Michael Weilbacher. Development Manager, Microsoft Studios this is a good presentation on some of …
- World of Warcraft Serversby AnthonyA little late in passing this on, but a curious piece of trivia: Blizzard were auctioning off the server blades for older realms in World of Warcraft. Hot Hardware has a good article about one of the server blades. Its intriguing to learn the specification of the server that ran a whole realm in the game (its not clear how …
- OnLiveby AnthonyOnLive 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 FPSby AnthonyThe 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 …
- Local Area Networkingby AnthonyTom’s Hardware has a good round-up of current LAN hardware suitable for home or small office networking. It gives a decent summary of standard wired and wireless networking hardware as well as a few more exotic systems such as power line networking. We should all be laying Cat6a UTP in anticipation of 10G Ethernet becoming cheap in …
- Networking for the Webby AnthonyThere 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 …
- Dead Rising 2by Anthony1000s 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 …
- GDC Vaultby AnthonyOur 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 …
- Halo: Reachby AnthonyI 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 …
- How to Run at 60Hzby AnthonyWe 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 …
- IEEE VR 2011 Course Finishedby AnthonyWe 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 & Middlewareby AnthonyPrompted 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?by AnthonyFPS 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) …
- Netgames 2010by AnthonyThe 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 Aidby AnthonyAn 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 Flightby AnthonyPacket 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 Architectureby AnthonyCCP 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 …
- Latency Onliveby AnthonyWe briefly discuss in the book the new class of thin client service characterized by OnLive and Gaikai. They require very little local client software, but at the expense that the images are computed remotely. Thus, the worst case end to end latency becomes the local latency (i.e. there is no longer any local control …
- This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Citiesby AnthonyI discovered Jim Rossignol’s book This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities, via Massively, an MMO news which I browse through occasionally, though the volume of posts is somewhat daunting! The book discusses Jim’s own experiences as a Quake player based in London, discusses gaming in Korea and has a long piece about gaming in EVE …
Continue reading “This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities”
- NetGames 2010by AnthonyThe 9th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games (NetGames 2010)(in conjunction with ACE 2010)November 16 and 17, 2010Taipei, Taiwan http://netgames2010.ntpu.edu.tw/ The 9th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games (NetGames 2010) will be held in Taipei, Taiwan, on November 16-17, 2010. The NetGames workshop brings together researchers and developers from …
- Ryzom Goes Open Sourceby AnthonyFrom http://dev.ryzom.com/news/13PARIS, FRANCE, May 6, 2010 — Winch Gate Properties Ltd, the developer and publisher of massively-multiplayer online science-fantasy role playing games, is proud to announce the release of the source code and artistic assets of the popular MMORPG Ryzom to the Free Software Development Community. Developers can now access the source code of the end-user …
- Second Life Servicesby AnthonyHoward Look gave the keynote speech at IEEE Virtual Reality last week. He talked about Linden Labs’ plans for the next few years of development. Apart from better user experience through better client viewer software, he talked about the back-end services and their plans for openning these services up. As noted elsewhere in this blog, the openning …
- RealXTendby AnthonyWe’ll have a lot more to say about SecondLife in upcoming articles on this site. However, just released are new versions of realXtend’s Naali viewer and Taiga server, which are Open Source implementations of the SecondLife server and client software. We discuss in the book that the client-server protocol for SecondLife was reverse engineered well before …
- State of the Internet Q3 2009by AnthonyThe latest edition of Akamai’s State of the Internet, covering Q3 2009, is now available. We refer to an earlier report in the book. From their announcement (Jan 28th), this report includes: Average measured connection speeds of the top 10 fastest cities per continent/region The top 10 ports seeing nearly 95 percent of all observed attack …
- Mammoth Mediaby AnthonyMammoth Media have produced an interesting guide to dedicated server software for games. They argue that games developers can better serve their customers by releasing dedicated server software that customers, or 3rd parties can install. In particular, the guide suggests that allowing ISPs to provision dedicated servers can improve customer experience, and alleviate demand at the …
- Legality of Deep Packet Inspectionby AnthonyIn the book we briefly touch on the issue of net neutrality; whether those running routers should be allowed to inspect the content of packets, rather than just the headers. This issue will rumble on for years, but the legality of so called deep-packet inspection, is being challenged in Europe. Virgin Media, which runs a big …