SEMMO: a scalable engine for massively multiplayer online games

ABSTRACT

We propose to demonstrate SEMMO, a consistency server for MMOs. The key features of SEMMO are its novel distributed consistency protocol and system architecture. The distributed nature of the engine allows the clients to perform all computations locally; the only computation that the central server performs is to determine the serialization order of game actions.

We will demo SEMMO through a game called Manhattan Pals, and show how we can exploit game semantics in order to support large-scale MMOs. In the demo, avatars of the audience will be able to play Manhattan Pals and thus experience various scalability and consistency effects of an MMO.

REFERENCES

• 1: S. Carless. http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=16458.
• 2: B. Dalton. Online gaming architecture: Dealing with the real-time data crunch in MMOs. In Proc. Austin GDC, 2007.
• 3: Thomas A. Funkhouser, RING: a client-server system for multi-user virtual environments, Proceedings of the 1995 symposium on Interactive 3D graphics, p.85-ff., April 09-12, 1995, Monterey, California, United States [doi>10.1145/199404.199418]
• 4: T. Keating. Dupes, speed hacks and black holes: How players cheat in MMOs. In Proc. Austin GDC, Austin, TX, September 2007.
• 5: Microsoft Corp. http://www.microsoft.com/esp.
• 6: Brian White , Jay Lepreau , Leigh Stoller , Robert Ricci , Shashi Guruprasad , Mac Newbold , Mike Hibler , Chad Barb , Abhijeet Joglekar, An integrated experimental environment for distributed systems and networks, Proceedings of the 5th symposium on Operating systems design and implementation

  Due to copyright restrictions we are not able to make the PDFs for this conference available for downloading

  , December 09-11, 2002, Boston, Massachusetts [doi>10.1145/1060289.1060313]
• 7: Walker White , Alan Demers , Christoph Koch , Johannes Gehrke , Rajmohan Rajagopalan, Scaling games to epic proportions, Proceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data, June 11-14, 2007, Beijing, China [doi>10.1145/1247480.1247486]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.2 DATABASE MANAGEMENT
      H.2.4 Systems
          Subjects: Concurrency

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
        D.2.11 Software Architectures
            Subjects: Domain-specific architectures

  H. Information Systems
  H.2 DATABASE MANAGEMENT
      H.2.4 Systems
          Subjects: Distributed databases

General Terms:
Design, Performance

Keywords:
games, scalability, virtual environments