Papers by Stephen John Turner
Proceedings of the sixteenth …, 2002
This paper presents a scalable archite ctur efor supporting large-scale inter active Internet gam... more This paper presents a scalable archite ctur efor supporting large-scale inter active Internet games. In order to support a large number of particip antsand to divide the workload, the virtual world is divided into partitions. Each partition is then assigned to a server. A client (i.e., a player or a particip ant)will join a server ac c ording to the position of the avatar it controls. Compared t o a c entr alized a r chite ctur e, this distribute d client-server archite ctur e i s m o r e s c alable. In addition, compared to a fully distribute d,peer-top eerarchite cture, it also provides a means for dete cting cheating in distribute dgames. Sinc einteractions and accounting information must be forwarded directly to one of the servers for quali cation and veri c ation,cheating amongst distribute dplayers of the game will be minimized. T o support secur ed c ommunication for interactions and accounting information as well as to speedup periodic update messages (e.g., position updates), a hybrid communication scheme using both TCP and IP multicast is used betwe enclients and the asso ciate d server. The communication among servers is enabled by the R un-TimeInfr astructure (R TI)services. The High Level Archite ctur e (HLA) Data Distribution Management (DDM) is employed to limit the amount of communication betwe enthe servers. In addition, the Ownership Management (OM) is also employed to implement the ne edfor transferring the avatars betwe en servers. In this p ap er, the design detail of the ar chite cture w i l l b e p r esente d.An e x p erimental interactive Internet game realize dusing the archite ctur e w i l l b e a l s o describ e d i n t h e p aper.
ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation, 2004
Maintaining a consistent view of the simulated world among different simulation nodes is a fundam... more Maintaining a consistent view of the simulated world among different simulation nodes is a fundamental problem in large scale distributed virtual environments (DVEs). In this paper, we characterize this problem by quantifying the time-space inconsistency in a DVE. To this end, a metric is defined to measure the time-space inconsistency in a DVE. One major advantage of the metric is that it may be estimated based on some characteristic parameters of a DVE, such as clock asynchrony, message transmission delay, the accuracy of the dead reckoning algorithm, the kinetics of the moving entity and human factors. Thus the metric can be used to evaluate the time-space consistency property of a DVE without the actual execution of the DVE application, which is especially useful in the design stage of a DVE. Our work also clearly shows how the characteristic parameters of a DVE are interrelated in deciding the time-space inconsistency, so that we may fine-tune the DVE to make it as consistent as possible. To verify the effectiveness of the metric, a Ping-Pong game is developed. Experimental results show that the metric is effective in evaluating the time-space consistency property of the game.
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Papers by Stephen John Turner