Presentation – NetGames 2008 Performance Analysis of Game world Partitioning Methods for Multiplayer Mobile Gaming Kusno Prasetya Bond University

Structure Introduction Interest Management and Game world partitions Proposed solution Simulations and result Conclusions

Introduction (1) Feasibility of multiplayer mobile gaming Obstacles in implementation Resource vs battery Heterogenous resource level availability Problems in wireless network Different type of game Player behaviour

Introduction (2) Possible solutions from networking point of view: Waiting for required wireless network technologies and their applications to be available Reduce the level of network resource usage Reduce the impact of network delay Increase the tolerance to delays and temporary disconnections Keep the complexity low!!!

Interest Management Filter/choose the receiver of certain data (in game terms: state update) The filter is based on a set of rules Balance between complexity and efficiency Examples: Player distance (based on AOI) Publisher/subscriber

Game World Partitions One of Interest Management (IM) methods Principle: Send data only to other players in the same cell or section Variations: Uniform and Variable Geometric shapes Random shapes (based on game map design)

Mechanism Divide game world into sections Player's Area Of Interest Cell migration and pre-migration Number of neighbouring cells

Solution for Game world Partition Brickworks pattern + Internal Partition (BIP)

Why Brickworks? Low complexity for border and location checking Fewer number of possible neighbours → Less cell to communicate with, less information to store (relative to number of players)

Why Internal Partitions? Consecutive/repetitive cell migration and pre- migration

Simulation mechanism Simulation consists of: Scenario Generator Game world and player Simulator

Simulation result

Simulation Result - Summary Player speed has the biggest influence in cell migration and pre-migration followed with cell shape and cell size In average, Rectangle partition is the most efficient in terms of having lower value of cell migration and pre-migration BIP consume less network resource usage overall because of its internal partition No consistent result with consecutive migration and pre-migration events (current average is 7- 10% of total migration/pre-migration rate)

Conclusion Different type of games will have different network resource usage specifically because of player speed, cell size and cell shape Potential to save/reduce network resource usage in BIP is related to consecutive cell migration and pre-migration Game world size has no real impact in final result

Future and ongoing research Comprehensive framework for multiplayer mobile game simulation Variable internal partition to solve crowding problems Multi-level AOI to reduce the impact of consecutive player pre-migration and migration

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