Journey: A Massively Multiplayer Online Game Middleware

Author

Denault, Alexandre ; Kienzle, Jörg

Volume

28

Issue

5

fYear

2011

Firstpage

38

Lastpage

44

Abstract

The design of massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) is challenging because scalability, consistency, reliability, and fairness must be achieved while providing good performance and enjoyable gameplay. This article presents Journey, an MMOG middleware that hides the complexity of dealing with the aforementioned issues from the game programmer. Journey builds on top of a peer-to-peer network infrastructure to provide load-balancing, fault-tolerance, and cheat-detection capabilities centered on object-oriented technology. Experimental results show performance measurements obtained by running Journey on more than 200 machines.

Keywords

computer games; middleware; object-oriented programming; peer-to-peer computing; resource allocation; software fault tolerance; software metrics; Journey; MMOG middleware; cheat-detection capability; fault-tolerance capability; load-balancing capability; massively multiplayer online game middleware; object-oriented technology; peer-to-peer network infrastructure; Avatars; Fault tolerant systems; Games; Middleware; Software architecture; Software design; distributed objects; domain-specific architectures; games; massively multiplayer online games; middleware;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Software, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0740-7459

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/MS.2011.88

Filename

5953579