Supporting continuous consistency in multiplayer online games

Multiplayer online games have become very popular in recent years. However, they generally suffer from network latency problem. If a player changes its states, it will take some time before the changes are reflected to other concurrent players. This significantly affects the interactivity of the game. Sometimes, it may even cause disputes among the players. In this paper, we present a continuous consistency control mechanism to support collaborative game applications. Specifically, we propose a relaxed consistency control model for continuous events. Based on this model, we have developed a method to provide a globalwise continuous synchronization on the states of dynamic game objects presented among concurrent game players. We show the performance of the proposed method through some experiments. Categories and Subject Descriptors: C.2.4 [Computer- Communication Networks]: Distributed Systems - Distributed applications General Terms: Performance, Human Factors.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: MM
• Authors: Frederick W. B. Li, Lewis W. F. Li, Rynson W. H. Lau
• Keywords: Consistency Control, Continuous Consistency Control, MM 2004, Network Latency Problem