Strifeshadow Fantasy: a massive multi-player online game

Abstract

Strifeshadow Fantasy (SSF) is a massive, multi-player, online, role-playing game. Players of this game, acting as avatars, search for ancient signs, and their goals are to defeat the god of destruction. Players can adventure in the game alone or co-operate with others through the chat box. SSF is available for free and there are currently more than 10,000 registered users. We highlight the overall software architecture of SSF, which is based on a simple server-client model and HTTP. We also describe, in detail, two problems encountered in the course of designing SSF and the solutions to them. The first one is a local state consistency problem, which is to ensure that each client participating in the game eventually receives all the state updates, once and only once. The second one is a connection jamming problem that is a result of using nonpersistent HTTP connections for communication between the game server and clients.