Networking and Online Games – Understanding and Engineering Multiplayer Internet Games

Grenville Armitage Editor and contributing author Grenville Armitage is Director of the Centre for Advanced Internet Architectures (CAIA) and Associate Professor of Telecommunications Engineering at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia. He received his Bachelor and PhD degrees in Electronic Engineering from the University of Melbourne, Australia in 1988 and 1994 respectively. He was a Senior Scientist in the Internetworking Research Group at Bellcore in New Jersey, USA (1994 to 1997) before moving to the High Speed Networks Research department at Bell Labs Research (Lucent Technologies, NJ, USA). During the 1990s he was involved in various Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working groups relating to IP Quality of Service (QoS). While looking for applications that might truly require IP QoS he became interested in multiplayer networked games after moving to Bell Labs Research Silicon Valley (Palo Alto, CA) in late 1999. Having lived in New Jersey and California he is now back in Australia - enjoying close proximity to family, and teaching students that data networking research should be fascinating, disruptive and fun. His parents deserve a lot of credit for helping his love of technology become a rather enjoyable career. Mark Claypool Contributing author Mark Claypool is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, USA. He is also the Director of the Interactive Media and Game Development major at WPI, a 4-year degree in the principles of interactive applications and computer-based game development. Dr. Claypool earned M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota in 1993 and 1997, respectively. His primary research interests include multimedia networking, congestion control, and network games. He and his wife have 2 kids, too many cats and dogs, and a bunch of computers and game consoles. He is into First Person Shooter games and Real-Time Strategy games on PCs, Beat-'em Up games on consoles, and Sports games on hand-helds. Philip Branch Contributing author Philip Branch is Senior Lecturer in Telecommunications Engineering within the Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies at Swinburne University of Technology. Before joining Swinburne he was a Development Manager with Ericsson AsiaPacific Laboratories and before that, a Research Fellow at Monash University where he conducted research into multimedia over access networks. He was awarded his PhD from Monash University in 2000. He enjoys bushwalking with his young family and playing very old computer games.

Author Biographies. Acknowledgements. 1 Introduction. 2 Early Online and Multiplayer Games. 2.1 Defining Networked and Multiplayer Games. 2.2 Early Multiplayer Games. 2.3 Multiplayer Network Games. 3 Recent Online and Multiplayer Games. 3.1 Communication Architectures. 3.2 The Evolution of Online Games. 3.3 Summary of Growth of Online Games. 3.4 The Evolution of Online Game Platforms. 3.5 Context of Computer Games. 4 Basic Internet Architecture. 4.1 IP Networks as seen from the Edge. 4.2 Connectivity and Routing. 4.3 Address Management. 5 Network Latency, Jitter and Loss. 5.1 The Relevance of Latency, Jitter and Loss. 5.2 Sources of Latency, Jitter and Loss in the Network. 5.3 Network Control of Lag, Jitter and Loss. 5.4 Measuring Network Conditions. 6 Latency Compensation Techniques. 6.1 The Need for Latency Compensation. 6.2 Prediction. 6.3 Time Manipulation. 6.4 Visual Tricks. 6.5 Latency Compensation and Cheating. 7 Playability versus Network Conditions and Cheats. 7.1 Measuring Player Tolerance for Network Disruptions. 7.2 Communication Models, Cheats and Cheat-Mitigation. 8 Broadband Access Networks. 8.1 What Broadband Access Networks are and why they Matter. 8.2 Access Network Protocols and Standards. 8.3 Cable Networks. 8.4 ADSL Networks. 8.5 Wireless LANs. 8.6 Cellular Networks. 8.7 Bluetooth Networks. 8.8 Conclusion. 9 Where Do Players Come from and When? 9.1 Measuring Your Own Game Traffic. 9.2 Hourly and Daily Game-play Trends. 9.3 Server-discovery (Probe Traffic) Trends. 9.4 Mapping Traffic to Player Locations. 10 Online Game Traffic Patterns. 10.1 Measuring Game Traffic with Timestamping Errors. 10.2 Sub-second Characteristics. 10.3 Sub-second Packet-size Distributions. 10.4 Sub-Second Inter-Packet Arrival Times. 10.5 Estimating the Consequences. 10.6 Simulating Game Traffic. 11 Future Directions. 11.1 Untethered. 11.2 Quality of Service. 11.3 New Architectures. 11.4 Cheaters Beware. 11.5 Augmented Reality. 11.6 Massively Multiplayer. 11.7 Pickup and Putdown. 11.8 Server Browsers. 12 Setting Up Online FPS Game Servers. 12.1 Considerations for an Online Game Server. 12.2 Wolfenstein Enemy Territory. 12.3 Half-Life 2. 12.4 Configuring FreeBSD's Linux-compatibility Mode. 13 Conclusion. 13.1 Networking Fundamentals. 13.2 Game Technologies and Development. 13.3 A Note Regarding Online Sources. Index.