A Distributed Multiplayer Game Server System
Eric Cronin, Burton Filstrup, Anthony R. Kurc · 2001
Unpredictable network latency is the most challenging problem in multiplayer game networking design. Latencies can be reduced by using a peer-to-peer rather than a client-server architecture. However, peer-to-peer architectures raise a whole new set of issues, the most immediate being game state synchronization. The drawbacks of the peer-to-peer architecture are addressed in our game system. The game system includes 1) a new mirrored-server architecture, 2) a trailing state synchronization protocol and 3) a many-to-many reliable multicast protocol. As a proof-of-concept, we converted Quake, a client-server game, to our mirrored-server architecture.