RTSenv: An experimental environment for real-time strategy games

Abstract

Today, Real-Time Strategy (RTS) games entertain tens of millions of players world-wide. This growing population expects new game designs and more scalable games every year. However, few tools and environments exist for game designers and implementers; of these, even fewer are available to researchers and game communities. In this work, we introduce RTSenv, an environment and associated set of tools for RTS games. Our environment can configure and manage the main aspects of RTS games, such as maps, computer-controlled units, and game scenarios. RTSenv leverages multi-cluster systems and reactive fault tolerance mechanisms to perform robust, multi-machine, and multi-instance game experiments. Using our reference implementation of RTSenv in DAS-4, a real multi-cluster system, and Amazon EC2, a commercial cloud, we show that our approach can be used in a variety of scenarios. Our results give evidence that several common assumptions made by researchers about game workloads do not hold in general for RTS games and thus warrant a more detailed investigation.