Challenges of Online Game Development : A Review
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paper_title: Adapting COTS games for military experimentation

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The ease of modifying computer games renders them effective as low-cost virtual worlds that have found relevance in military experimentation. This article presents the Singapore Armed Forces' (SAF) and the Defence Science & Technology Agency's (DSTA) initiatives to leverage games for concept exploration. The SAF Centre for Military Experimentation conducted a gaming workshop in October 2004 to explore how soldiers could make use of information to alleviate the challenges in an urban warfare scenario. The workshop generated many insights into the issues surrounding information requirement and usage, sense making, and command and control. As the SAF's technology partner, the DSTA is also seeking to illustrate the concept and value of integrated knowledge-centric systems through games. These initiatives represent the first steps in our commitment to explore and harness computer games in engaging our next generation of soldiers in the development of war-fighting concepts of the future.
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paper_title: Rules, gameplay, and narratives in video games

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An explanatory study is conducted to examine the different kinds of rules in video games. Two layers of game, the abstract and the narrative layer, are explored to unify the study of gameplay and narratives. Derivatives of paidea rules and ludus rules are analyzed in relation to gameplay and narratives. A model is presented to show the relation between rules, gameplay, and narratives. Video games are seen as having two layers, an abstract layer and a narrative layer, which are linked by game rules. It is hence maintained that gameplay and narratives should not be antagonistic; they should be complementary when studying video games.
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paper_title: Better scripts, better games

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The video game industry earned $8.85 billion in revenue in 2007,almost as much as movies made at the box office. Much of thisrevenue was generated by blockbuster titles created by large groupsof people. Though large development teams are not unheard of in thesoftware industry, game studios tend to have unique collections ofdevelopers. Software engineers make up a relatively small portionof the game development team, while the majority of the teamconsists of content creators such as artists, musicians, anddesigners.
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paper_title: Load balancing for massively multiplayer online games

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Supporting thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of players is a requirement that must be satisfied when delivering server based online gaming as a commercial concern. Such a requirement may be satisfied by utilising the cumulative processing resources afforded by a cluster of servers. Clustering of servers allow great flexibility, as the game provider may add servers to satisfy an increase in processing demands, more players, or remove servers for routine maintenance or upgrading. If care is not taken, the way processing demands are distributed across a cluster of servers may hinder such flexibility and also hinder player interaction within a game. In this paper we present an approach to load balancing that is simple and effective, yet maintains the flexibility of a cluster while promoting player interaction.
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paper_title: Interest management middleware for networked games

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In this paper we present an implementation of an interest management scheme using standard message oriented middleware (MOM) technologies to provide scalable message dissemination for networked games. The aim of all interest management schemes is to identify when objects that inhabit a virtual world should be interacting and to enable such interaction via message passing while preventing objects that should not be interacting from exchanging messages. The time taken by existing interest management schemes to resolve which objects influence each other may be too large to enable the desired interaction to occur. Furthermore, existing interest management implementations tend to be proprietary and are built directly on top of networking protocols. In this paper we present an approach to interest management based on the predicted movement of objects. Our approach determines the frequency of message exchange between objects on the likelihood that such objects will influence each other in the near future. We then demonstrate, via implementation and experimentation, how existing middleware standards provide a suitable platform for the deployment of our interest management scheme.
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paper_title: The Brave New World of Multiplayer Online Games: Synchronization Issues with Smart Solutions

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The technology supporting multiplayer online games (MOGs) has greatly improved in the past few years. This represents great news both for players all over the world and for researchers that are struggling behind tough problems in real-time distributed systems. Indeed, MOGs represent a peculiar class of distributed systems, sharing features, requirements, challenges, and thereby also feasible solutions. To this aim, we focus on issues and state-of art solutions related to a crucial aspect in MOG deployment: the synchronization of its nodes. In particular, we review techniques able to guarantee that the system evolves in a quick and consistent way and highlight how they can be made more effective by exploiting specific game features. To further support this claim, we also present results from an experimental evaluation we performed.
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paper_title: ISIS: A System for Fault-Tolerant Distributed Computing

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The ISIS system transforms abstract type specifications into fault-tolerant distributed implementations, while insulating users from the mechanisms whereby fault-tolerance is achieved. This paper discusses the transformations that are used within ISIS, methods for achieving improved performance by concurrently updating replicated data, and user-level issues that arise when ISIS is employed to solve a fault-tolerant distributed problem. We describe a small set of communication primitives upon which the system is based. These achieve high levels of concurrency while respecting ordering requirements imposed by the caller. Finally, the performance of a prototype is reported for a variety of system loads and configurations. In particular, we demonstrate that performance of a replicated object in ISIS can equal or exceed that of a nonreplicated object.
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paper_title: Push-Pull Interest Management for Virtual Worlds

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Several approaches for scalable interest management (IM) within real-time distributed virtual environments (DVEs) have been proposed based upon some division of the data-space in to disjoint volumes or cells. Any such approach, however, must implement some mechanism for propagating the query and update messages around the distributed system. The efficiency of this process can greatly effect the scalability of such systems. In this paper we evaluate an adaptive approach to this problem.
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paper_title: On demand platform for online games &

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A shared infrastructure, based on emerging on demand computing models, that supports multiple games offers an attractive option for large-scale multiplayer online game providers who want to avoid the risk of investing in dedicated resources. In this paper, we describe a prototype implementation of a service platform for online games. The platform design follows the on demand computing paradigm. It offers integration using open standards and off-the-shelf software and embraces virtualization and simplification to enable sharing resources across games. We describe our experience with identifying appropriate performance metrics for provisioning game servers and with implementing reusable platform components that provide useful functionality for a variety of games.
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paper_title: CLOS in Context: The Shape of the Design Space

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This chapter contains sections titled: Incremental Extension of Operations, Classes and Types, Factoring Descriptions, Extensions, Reflection, Conclusions, Acknowledgements, Bibliography
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paper_title: A Metaobject Architecture for Fault Tolerant Distributed Systems: The FRIENDS Approach

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The FRIENDS system developed at LAAS-CNRS is a metalevel architecture providing libraries of metaobjects for fault tolerance, secure communication, and group-based distributed applications. The use of metaobjects provides a nice separation of concerns between mechanisms and applications. Metaobjects can be used transparently by applications and can be composed according to the needs of a given application, a given architecture, and its underlying properties. In FRIENDS, metaobjects are used recursively to add new properties to applications. They are designed using an object oriented design method and implemented on top of basic system services. This paper describes the FRIENDS software-based architecture, the object-oriented development of metaobjects, the experiments that we have done, and summarizes the advantages and drawbacks of a metaobject approach for building fault-tolerant systems.
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Title: Challenges of Online Game Development: A Review

Section 1: Background Information on the Online Gaming Industry
Description 1: Provide background information and context about the online gaming industry, emphasizing its growth, popularity, and inherent challenges.

Section 2: Technical Challenges in Online Game Development
Description 2: Discuss the various technical challenges faced by online game developers, including issues related to networking, scalability, and execution correctness.

Section 3: Multiplayer Gaming
Description 3: Describe the impact of technological factors on multiplayer gaming, including network limitations and the management of game states across multiple-player consoles.

Section 4: Diverse Skill Sets in Game Development
Description 4: Explain the importance of various skill sets needed in game development, such as networking, graphics, databases, and the challenges in managing these diverse teams.

Section 5: Financial Implications of Online Game Development
Description 5: Highlight the costs involved in bringing an online game to market and maintaining it, including figures and comparisons to other Internet applications.

Section 6: Proprietary Play and Engineering Approaches
Description 6: Explore the different genres of online gaming and the distinct engineering approaches used to support these diverse game types.

Section 7: Standardization and Minimal Standardization
Description 7: Discuss the lack of standardization in the online gaming industry and its impact on code reuse and interoperability.

Section 8: Content Evolution and Management Issues
Description 8: Investigate the challenges associated with content evolution in persistent virtual worlds and the limitations of current approaches for both vendors and players.

Section 9: Describing Play and Interaction
Description 9: Elaborate on the need for a mechanism to describe interaction in gaming environments and the complexities involved in managing interest and influence.

Section 10: Interest Management and Scalability
Description 10: Examine the techniques used to manage player interaction and scalability in online games, focusing on interest management schemes and synchronization.

Section 11: Middleware and Server-Side Standards
Description 11: Present recent developments in middleware for game development and the steps taken towards creating scalable server-side solutions for MMOs.

Section 12: Reflection, Rules, and Content Evolution
Description 12: Discuss the potential of using reflection and rule-based approaches to manage evolutionary change in persistent virtual worlds.

Section 13: Promoting Rich Interaction and Service Usage
Description 13: Highlight initiatives aimed at enhancing interaction in games by utilizing service discovery and description technologies, drawing parallels with eCommerce solutions.

Section 14: Conclusion and Future Directions
Description 14: Summarize the key points discussed in the paper and suggest future research avenues to address the ongoing challenges in online game development.