Evaluating ginnungagap: a middleware for migration of partial game-state utilizing core-selection for latency reduction

Abstract

Massively multi-player online games (MMOGs) have stringent latency requirements and must support large numbers of concurrent players. To handle these conflicting requirements, it is common to divide the virtual environment into virtual regions, and spawn multiple instances of isolated game areas (known as dungeons or instances) to serve multiple distinct groups of players. As MMOGs attract players from all around the world, it is plausible to disperse these regions and instances on georgraphically distributed servers. Core selection algorithms can then be applied to locate an optimal server for placing a region or instance, based on player latencies. Functionality for migrating objects supports this objective, with a distributed name server ensuring that references to the moved objects are efficiently maintained. As a result, we anticipate a decrease in aggregate latency for the affected players. With Ginnungagap we present the implementation and evaluation of a middleware that combines these ideas and present its feasibility.