A global timestamp-based scalable framework for Multi-player Online Games

Abstract

Massive Multi-player Online Games (MMOGs) are rapidly gaining in popularity, as the access to high bandwidth connectivity becomes a commodity in the consumer market. With player subscriptions for popular games reaching seven digit numbers and concurrent player participation in the hundreds of thousands, new high-performance adaptive frameworks, which aid system programmers, are required. Primary research challenges that have to be addressed are compensating network latency and jitter, keeping system-wide data consistent, enabling fair resource sharing and interaction between game players, and expanding the scale of the system as the number of players increases. A global timestamp based approach is presented and describes issues and implementation approaches based on a high-level object-oriented real-time programming methodology called the time-triggered message-triggered object (TMO) programming scheme.