Minecraft computer game performance analysis and network traffic emulation by a custom bot
Trevor Alstad, J. Riley Duncan, Simon Detlor, Brad French, Heath Caswell, Zane Ouimet, Youry Khmelevsky, Gaétan Hains, Rob Bartlett, Alex Needham · 2015
To simulate player traffic within the game we developed an automated bot for a popular online game Minecraft. The first emulation goal was for the bot to realistically replicate network traffic that a normal player would use while playing the game. The second emulation goal was to investigate the maximum possible workload on a virtual multicores and multi-CPUs CentOS server by running different number of active Minecraft games on many cores of the multi-CPU servers simultaneously. We created a scriptable bot capable of performing many common game actions, while generating comparable traffic to that of a player. This facilitates network and game server world optimization. It is allowed us to create a new testing and emulation environment to investigation network and server performance in our virtual Gaming Private Network (GPN) infrastructure.