GameOD: an internet based game-on-demand framework

ABSTRACT

Multiplayer online 3D games are becoming very popular in recent years. However, existing games require the complete game content to be installed prior to game playing. Since the content is usually large in size, it may be difficult to run these games on a PDA or other handheld devices. It also pushes game companies to distribute their games as CDROMs/DVDROMs rather than online downloading. On the other hand, due to network latency, players may perceive discrepant status of some dynamic game objects. In this paper, we present a game-on-demand (GameOD) framework to distribute game content progressively in an on-demand manner. It allows critical contents to be available at the players' machines in a timely fashion. We present a simple distributed synchronization method to allow concurrent players to synchronize their perceived game status. Finally, we show some performance results of the proposed framework.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.3 COMPUTER GRAPHICS
      I.3.2 Graphics Systems

General Terms:
Design, Performance

Keywords:
distributed synchronization, distributed virtual environments, multiplayer online games, on-demand replication