Online Games - Prospects, Problems, and Payoff Message Board

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Technology Stocks : Online Games - Prospects, Problems, and Payoff

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To: Bret P who wrote (20)	4/26/1998 6:07:00 PM
From: Andy Riedel	of 30

Bret, 3D quality has little to do with network latency if the network model and display engine are properly separated. Early games in this arena such as the original Doom used to sync the frame rate with the network receive rate. In essence, the display frame rate was tied to receiving messages from all other players in the game. One slow link to another player would cause your display to slow down until you received the messages for that frame. Most newer games (Quake, Quake II, and others) have separated the display from the network and used a variety of methods to have each person's display interpolate the actual state of the game as best as possible. Once the necessary network messages have been received, the interpolation is corrected by the network messages containing the actual game state. QuakeWorld pioneered this effort and was able to support 32 player games in this manner. MicroProse does have a very good lineup of titles. Magic the Gathering could do extremely well if the "magic" of owning and collecting physical game cards could somehow be reflected in the online version. Perhaps digitally signed, unique, virtual cards!?!? Latency is cause by numerous factors including modem latencies, server hops (i.e. how many servers must you hop through to get to the server running the game), packet delays through various ISP's and their peerings with each other, and bottlenecks at the major Internet gateways (MAE East and West). It is hard to say exactly which factor causes the most latency as it tends to be dynamic. The best solution going forward IMHO is to distribute as much as possible to make the actual location of the game server (in Internet space as opposed to physical space) be the optimal "distance" from all players in the game. "Distance" in these terms equates to latency. For example, if 4 players are playing a game together, the server launching software should determine which physical server provides the best average latency to the 4 players involved and dynamically allocate the server at the location. Mplayer.com uses a variety of mechanisms such as these to achieve optimal gameplay. Andy

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