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 …
Category archives: Blog
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) …
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 …
Latency Onlive
We 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 Cities
I 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 …
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NetGames 2010
The 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 Source
From 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 …