A Systematic Mapping Study of MMOG Backend Architectures

Abstract

The advent of utility computing has revolutionized almost every sector of traditional software development. Especially commercial cloud computing services, pioneered by the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft, have provided an unprecedented opportunity for the fast and sustainable development of complex distributed systems. Nevertheless, existing models and tools aim primarily for systems where resource usage—by humans and bots alike—is logically and physically quite disperse resulting in a low likelihood of conflicting resource access. However, a number of resource-intensive applications, such as Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) and large-scale simulations introduce a requirement for a very large common state with many actors accessing it simultaneously and thus a high likelihood of conflicting resource access. This paper presents a systematic mapping study of the state-of-the-art in software technology aiming explicitly to support the development of MMOGs, a class of large-scale, resource-intensive software systems. By examining the main focus of a diverse set of related publications, we identify a list of criteria that are important for MMOG development. Then, we categorize the selected studies based on the inferred criteria in order to compare their approach, unveil the challenges faced in each of them and reveal research trends that might be present. Finally we attempt to identify research directions which appear promising for enabling the use of standardized technology for this class of systems.

Athlos: A Framework for Developing Scalable MMOG Backends on Commodity Clouds

“…Researchers and game developers have used a plethora of methods to implement and deploy their MMOGs on the cloud. Based on the results of previous studies [12,41] and insights from studying various games, we have developed a set of models, methods, and tools with which MMOG backends can be developed for and hosted on commodity cloud platforms. In this section, we describe our approach, presenting Athlos, a framework for developing scalable MMOG backends on commodity clouds.…”

“…A paper by Kasenides and Paspallis [12], provided a systematic study of architecture types used in MMOG backend development. These were categorized into three groups: Client-Server, Peer-to-Peer, and Hybrid architectures.…”

“…The type of architecture used in MMOG backends is important to their development as it can affect performance, security, and deployment strategy. Client-server architectures are by far the predominant type of architecture used for this type of application [12]. Studies have shown that the security and efficiency of a distributed, centralized architecture can allow MMOG backends to support thousands of concurrent players while taking advantage of various parallelization techniques such as zoning, replication, and instancing [20,22].…”

“…Game developers have traditionally hosted their MMOG backends on dedicated servers and private clouds, rather than public clouds. Nonetheless, recent trends show that there is a slow shift toward higher abstraction layers such as PaaS, and perhaps the use of commodity clouds [12]. One of the probable causes for this shift might be the inherent elasticity of these higher layers.…”

Multiplayer Game Backends: A Comparison of Commodity Cloud-Based Approaches

“…In the past, the resource-intensive nature of such applications has led game providers to opt for on-premise rather than for public cloud solutions to host their game's backend [13,38,45]. However, trends emerging from a recent study we conducted [28] show that the use of cloud technology has become the most popular option for deploying MMOGs, and also that it is moving towards higher abstraction layers such as Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).…”