Improving gaming experience in zonal MMOGs

Abstract

Synchronous communication is a primary concern for multi-user virtual environments like Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs). Most of the MMOGs offer discrete view for the avatars and follow logical zone layout for easy state management. The avatar movement, from one logical zone to another, causes reorganization at the P2P overlay structure. Its recurrent nature along with unintelligent zone crossing approaches eventually hampers synchronous communication. In this paper, we present performance enhancement mechanisms to reduce P2P overlay reorganization penalties based on avatars' physical characteristics. Avatars' unpredictable movement around the zone boundaries also incur repeated connections and disconnections either among the zone masters or among the multiple peers in the overlay networks. Interest driven zone crossing, dynamic shared region between adjacent zones, and clustering of the entities based on their attributes significantly alleviates these problems and also provides continuous view and seamless region crossing to players. The technical contribution of this paper is to present the effectiveness of object clustering mechanism and interest driven zone crossing with dynamic shared region between each adjacent zones to enhance the gaming experience of MMOG players or users of other types of networked virtual environments (VE). Copyright 2007 ACM.