1 Semester

48 Hours

Hawthorn, Sarawak

HET104 LAN Principles or HIT2120 Data Communications and Security and HIT1052 Software Development 2 or HIT3081 or HIT3181 Technical Software Development or HIT2302 Object-Oriented Programming

Nil

Credit Points: 12.5 Credit Points

Related Course/s:

A unit of study in the Bachelor of Multimedia (Games and Interactivity) / Bachelor of Science (Computer Science and Software Engineering).
Note: This unit will be offered from 2008.

Aims & Objectives:

This unit of study will provide students with exposure to, and understanding of, IP-based networking fundamentals as they pertain to interactive, multiplayer online computer games. The focus will be on how the Internet's technical capabilities enable a variety of client-server and client-client communication models, and how the Internet's performance limitations impact on a game developers ability to support seamless interactive and immersive experiences for their players. Students will end up with a deep appreciation for the engineering trade-offs inherent in using wide-area and local-area IP networks for multiplayer immersive environments, covering at least the First Person Shooter (FPS), Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG), and Real Time Strategy (RTS) genres.

Teaching Methods:

Lectures plus laboratory-based project work

Assessment:

Assignments, Examination

Content:

The unit of study will review IP networking fundamentals, cover concepts of unicast UDP/IP and TCP/IP communication, and use high level examples of existing multiplayer online games to discuss ISP considerations (predicting traffic loads from gamers) and game developer considerations (e.g. lag compensation, dealing with packet loss, etc).
Basic review of 'The Internet', IP addressing schemes, IP routing, hierarchy of service providers, evolution of multiplayer games as a driver for online service deployment (esp. broadband).

• History(1): early networked games (e.g. 'DOOM' broadcasting on Ethernet, Doom2 improving network utilisation, networked space warfare games of the 'turns happen every X hours', etc).
• History(2): putting 'games' into a broader context of 'immersive environments' and distributed simulation environments (e.g. US military and DARPA funded work in the 1990s.
• Network transport - how the choice of UDP versus TCP depends on game style (interactivity).
• Where does Lag and packet loss come from and why are they important? (Network congestion in ISP networks and, abstractly, in home routers).
• Importance of Lag compensation techniques across different game styles.
• Current research on traffic lag, jitter and loss sensitivity in players.
• Broadband access - how the different technologies (e.g. Cable, ADSL, wireless) affect consumer experience in online games;
• Where do players come from? Topological distributions of game players and the implications for optimal location and distribution of servers on the network.
• Traffic patterns and their impact on the underlying IP network (e.g. packet size distributions, packets per second, impact on jitter, correlation of client->server traffic, burstiness).
• Future directions (emerging technologies that may affect how ISPs offer or deploy services in support of interactive multiplayer games, IP service quality, impact of NAPT/NAT on end to end transparency and client-client communication models, relationship to peer-to-peer communications models, etc).

Reading Materials:

Armitage, G, Claypool, M & Branch, P Networking and Online Games: Understanding and Engineering Multiplayer Internet Games, John Wiley & Sons, UK, April 2006 (ISBN: 0470018577)