A dynamic approach to consistency management for mobile multiplayer games

Abstract

International audienceIn multiplayer games, where many players take part in a game while communicating through a network, the players may have an inconsistent view of the game world because of the communication delays across the network. Consistency maintenance algorithms must be used to have a uniform view of the game world. The majority of these algorithms are used for wired network and they use a fixed approach which is hardly adaptable to the changing network and game environment. In these algorithms, an approach called locallag is used which delays the presentation of updates so as to account for network latencies. The value of local lag is usually fixed for a game session. In wireless networks where the network latencies can varies greatly, fixed local-lag approach can cause inconsistencies in the game state between different replicas. Also dead-reckoning is used along with local-lag to hide network latency and improve responsiveness. Keeping a fixed dead-reckoning approach in the face of changing network and game environment can produce unpredictable game behaviour which can cause human players to quit the game. In this paper, we present a dynamic and adaptable approach for local-lag and dead-reckoning in which the algorithm's parameters are changed according to the changing and unpredictable network and game environment. We believe that this adaptable approach can greatly improve consistency and hence the playability of the gam

Masking the Effects of Delays in Human-to-Human Remote Interaction

“…However, with more than two participants seeing significantly different latencies, the fairness cannot be maintained for all computers. In [22] and [23], the LL is integrated with DR to synchronize participants and keep better consistency among all computers.…”

Compensatory dead-reckoning-based update scheduling for distributed virtual environments

“…The local lag technique is commonly used to account for different message delays in the transmission among participants by introducing artificial delays in processing participant inputs 29–32 or state updates. 33,34 The artificial delays introduced can be adjusted according to the states of entities in the virtual world and the quality of underlying network connections. 30,34 The local lag technique can work together with the DR-based update mechanism to improve consistency in the DVE.…”

“…33,34 The artificial delays introduced can be adjusted according to the states of entities in the virtual world and the quality of underlying network connections. 30,34 The local lag technique can work together with the DR-based update mechanism to improve consistency in the DVE. 32,34 However, using the local lag technique, the responsiveness of the DVE decreases due to the artificial delays introduced.…”

Dynamic Reduction of Rollbacks in Wireless Multi-user Virtual Environments

“…Additionally, the local lag [10] allows to delay the display of local command(s) so that update messages from remote players can arrive, thereby avoiding a causal disorder of messages. We have already proposed in [9] the idea of dynamically changing the parameters for dead-reckoning and local lag according to the network delays and the positions and speeds of the game's objects. In this paper, we combine this idea with our dynamic rollback reduction approach to achieve consistency in multiplayer games according to the need of the situation.…”

“…In wireless networks, the communication delays are higher as compared to wired networks and also jitters can occur impacting the network delays. Also, we believe that in a multiplayer game, different objects and regions in the game have different consistency requirements that vary during the game play as we have already discussed in [9]. In this paper, we propose an optimistic approach based on a dynamic rollback mechanism which adapts its behaviour according to the changes in the network conditions and the consistency requirements of the game at a particular time.…”