After 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 …
Category archives: Blog
Second Edition
We 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 Drop
Some 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 Sansar
SecondLife 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 …
NvidiaGrid
Not 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 3D
Definitely 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 …
FlappyMMO
Perhaps 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 …
RapidFire
AMD 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 Warcraft
Looking 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 Gaikai
We 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 …