VFC4FPS - Vector-Field Consistency for a First Person Shooter Game

November 15, 2010

Multiplayer online games are increasingly more popular. Keeping the game state updated and consistent among all players in soft real-time is critical. Sending the complete game state to all players does not scale with the number of players. One way to increase the game scalability is by reducing it's network traffic, and one way to reduce network traffic is by exploiting the player's sensory limits. However, current solutions typically use an all or nothing filtering, where a player only receives updates of objects inside his sensory zone. In this work we use the Vector-Field Consistency. VFC offers a progressive consistency reduction. They do this by using multiple zones, each with a set of consistency requirements, which are reduced with the increasing distance. We intend to obtain a network traffic reduction of at least half of the original traffic of an online game. To that effect we use the Cube 2: Sauerbraten, a First Person Shooter game. In this kind of game, players have a limited view of the virtual world. With that in mind we added the concept of Field of View to VFC in order to improve performance. Results show that is possible to significantly reduce network traffic without harming consistency and playability.

Authors in the community:

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  B

  Bruno Filipe da Costa Pereira Loureiro

  ist155362

Supervisors of this institution:

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  P

  Paulo Jorge Pires Ferreira

  ist12958

• 

  L

  Luís Manuel Antunes Veiga

  ist14191

electrical-engineering-electronic-engineering-information-engineering - Electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering

eng - English

Instituto Superior Técnico