This paper proposes a fully distributed architecture to support massively multiplayer games (MMGs) on a peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay network. P2P networks provide a scalable and robust solution for MMGs. Furthermore, similarly to real world interactions, MMG players interact with their surrounding, i.e., with visible players and objects in the virtual world. Thus, selforganization of peers based on their visibility property is essential for efficient overlay network support in MMGs. Also, the overlay network must be re-organized consistently in the face of players' position changes. In this paper, we achieve these goals by designing a peer-to-peer overlay network based on the Voronoi diagram. Each player has a responsibility region that includes nearby objects, and is responsible for updates' dissemination occurring in this region to provide game state consistency among the players who are concerned by the updates. As a proof of concept, we simulated a simple game application to demonstrate the feasibility of our architecture.

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Peer-to-peer (P2P) architectures have recently become very popular in massively multiplayer games (MMGs). While P2P gaming offers high scalability compared to client/server architectures, it introduces several major issues related to data distribution and game state consistency. In this paper, we report our initial version of VoroGame, a P2P architecture for MMGs that addresses these issues by combining a structured P2P overlay based on a distributed hash table (DHT) for data distribution, with a Voronoi diagram used for virtual game world decomposition and semantic overlay support. The resulting hybrid architecture enables a fully distributed management of data and state information, and ensures efficient dissemination of game state updates to relevant peers.

International audiencePeer-to-peer (P2P) architectures have become popular for designing scalable virtual environments (VEs) in recent years. However, one question that remains is whether a single overlay can be flexible enough to support different types of VEs. We present S-VON, a P2P overlay that attempts this goal by providing spatial publish/subscribe (SPS) services. Besides flexibility, S-VON also aims to be practical and efficient by utilizing super-peers and considering the physical topology (i.e., network distance) to reduce latencies. Our simulations show that super-peers provide a unique design space where both bandwidth usage and latencies can be effectively reduced, such that even a crowded Second Life region can be hosted with residential ADSL