The Hybrid Game Architecture: Distributing Bandwidth for MMOGs While Maintaining Central Control

• Main Author: Jardine, Jared L.
• Format: Others
• Published: BYU ScholarsArchive 2008
• Subjects: MMOGs; game architecture; peer-to-peer; client-server; hybrid game architecture; reduced bandwidth; Computer Sciences
• Online Access: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/1559; https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2558&context=etd

Current Massively Multi-player Online Games (MMOGs) have enormous server-side bandwidth requirements. The costs of providing this bandwidth is in turn passed on to the consumer in the form of high monthly subscription fees. Prior work has primarily focused on distributing this bandwidth using peer-to-peer architectures, but these architectures have difficulty preventing cheating, overwhelming low resource peers, and maintaining consistent game state. We have developed a hybrid game architecture that combines client-server and peer-to-peer technologies to prevent cheating, maintain centralized and consistent game state, significantly reduce central server bandwidth, and prevent lower capacity players from being overwhelmed. By dramatically reducing the bandwidth needed to host a game without introducing additional liabilities, our hybrid architecture reduces the costs associated with that bandwidth and allows MMOG developers to reduce the cost of monthly subscription fees. In addition, because the central server will need less bandwidth per player, a single server is able to support considerably more concurrent players. Our experiments show that bandwidth can be reduced by up to 95% and a single server can support a game twice as large.