Distributed database support for networked real-time multiplayer games

Abstract: The focus of this dissertation is on large-scale and long-running networked real-time multiplayer games. In this type of games, each player controls one or many entities, which interact in a shared virtual environment. Three attributes - scalability, security, and fault tolerance - are considered essential for this type of games. The normal approaches for building this type of games, using a client/server or peer-to-peer architecture, fail in achieving all three attributes. We propose a server-network architecture that supports these attributes. In this architecture, a cluster of servers collectively manage the game state and each server manages a separate region of the virtual environment. We discuss how the architecture can be extended using proxies, and we compare it to other similar architectures. Further, we investigate how a distributed database management system can support the proposed architecture. Since efficiency is very important in this type of games, some properties of traditional database systems must be relaxed. We also show how methods for increasing scalability, such as interest management and dead reckoning, can be implemented in a database system. Finally, we suggest how the proposed architecture can be validated using a simulation of a large-scale game.