Dynamic Game-Play Arbitrators with 3D Voronoi Diagrams

Abstract

Voronoi Diagrams (VD) have recently been proposed as a way to enable Massively Multi-player On-line Games (MMOG) and Virtual Environments (VE) on fully Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network architectures. Using typical two-dimensional varieties, the peers maintain direct single-hop connections to others in the game-world in a scalable manner. However, direct connections do not guarantee the timely delivery of update messages amongst peers. There is also the issue of fair game-play resolution between opposing players. Thus, as is standard industry practice, game-play arbitrators are needed. Arbitrators also incorporate lag-compensation techniques which improve the responsiveness felt by individual players, thereby enhancing their experience. The approach outlined in this short paper aims to bridge the gap between industry and academia, by introducing the use of an additional 3rd dimension when deriving the VDs. Initial experimentation indicates that 3D-VD is computationally feasible within the time constraints of a typical game. A discussion into several metrics that can act as the differentiating 3rd dimension is also included.