Combat state-aware interest management for online games: demo

Abstract

Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) allow thousands of players to interact with each other in a large-scale virtual environment. Interest management is an important technique used to raise the scalability of a game by limiting the amount of information transmitted to the players according to their relevance. In this paper, we focus on the problem of performing interest management during combats, which are highly interactive and fast-paced events. We have developed a combat state-aware interest management (CSAIM) system which can dynamically adjust update rates based on the current game context, thereby maximizing the utility in the trade-off between consistency and performance. We have implemented CSAIM in MMOnkey, our MMORPG research framework. Our interactive demo client visualizes the interest area adjusted based on players' actions.