The vMatrix: Equi-Ping Game Server Placement For Pre-Arranged First-Person-Shooter Multiplayer Matches

Today most multiplayer game servers are pre-located statically, which makes it hard for gamers to find equi-ping hosts for their matches. This is especially important for first person shooter games (FPS), which are a class of interactive games that is very sensitive to difference in ping between the participants and the hosting server. In this paper we present a novel solution, which builds on top of the classic operating systems concept of a virtual machine monitor (VMM). A VMM allows us to encapsulate the state of the game server in a virtual machine file, which could then be activated on any real machine running the VMM software. The main advantage of this solution is mainly backward compatibility, that is we can take any existing FPS game and migrate it to this platform without any code changes to the game client nor the server. Another advantage is the economies of scale for such a network since it can be shared between different games. We describe our vMatrix framework and addres...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: AICCSA
• Authors: Amr Awadallah, Mendel Rosenblum
• Keywords: AICCSA 2006, Game Servers, Multiplayer Game Servers, Virtual Machine