Massively multiplayer online games are always interesting to study as far as network optimizations and data transfer optimizations that they resort two. Researchers from Thailand and China are building a Linux-based peer-to-peer massively multiplayer online game and have published a paper on the problems they encountered:
Building real-time interactive P2P game playing applications in Linux posses many challenges and opens a wide area of research. There have been many implementations of remote interactive servers for game playing in some universities or companies providing collaborative access to the remote services.Most current systems that provide a collaborative remote game environment either use the (multi) Unicast technique or the Multicast technique to transmit data packets to the participants of the experiment group in the network. Both of these schemes have disadvantages and advantages. In this paper we implement architecture under Linux for real-time multiplayer game application based on XCAST especially for the cases where there exist numerous small collaborative groups. We had provided extension to the Linux kernel and XCAST and show that formation of numerous simultaneous groups, where each group would collaborate for a separate game, is possible. The system proposed is robust in consistently providing group formation and collaboration activities in real time, back-up route or priority queuing, and on time packet delivery with minimum delay in network in the presence of continuous node arrival and departure in the entire game playing procedure. We also show that for data packets of low size, the use of XCAST in the network layer decreases the stress at the sender in each group whereas due to the increased header size of the XCAST packets. Our implementation has shown significant improvements to meet the demands of some real-time game applications.
