Multiplayer game cheating prevention with pipelined lockstep protocol

Abstract

Multiplayer games are becoming more and more popular. One of the reasons is that they let geographically distant players play together. We first look at a synchronization protocol and a protocol for prevention of common cheating techniques in real-time multiplayer games. We then propose an optimization to the current cheat-proofing techniques which takes advantage of synchronization delay inherent in current implementation of multiplayer games. Previous work has studied synchronization techniques [1] and cheat-proofing techniques [2] in isolation, without exploring their interaction. Our optimization has the same guarantee as current cheat-proofing techniques and can increase interaction rate between players in real-time multiplayer games. © 2003 by Springer Science+Business Media New York.