Rokkatan
Jens Müller, Sergei Petrovich Gorlatch · Computers in entertainment · 2006
While massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) involve large numbers of simultaneous players, two other popular game classes -- first-person shooter (FPS) and real-time strategy (RTS) games - are still only rarely considered for massively multiplayer gaming. A main technical problem for scaling these genres to be massively multiplayer is the absence of a suitable scalable multiserver networking approach. While the commonly used zoning concept performs well for an MMORPG, it is barely suitable for RTS and FPS games. As a scalable networking alternative for these genres, this article summarizes our work on the proxy-server architecture, which uses multiple servers for a single game session and implements a full replication of the game state at all proxies. We present our work on the game Rokkatan, our online evaluator game which enables massively multiplayer real-time strategy gaming using our proxy-server network architecture. We discuss the implementation of Rokkatan and analyze the distributed computation of the proxy-server approach by integrating an analytical scalability model into Rokkatan. Our experimental game sessions demonstrate high scalability of Rokkatan, which allows several hundreds of users to participate in a single, fast-paced game session.