From a single- to multi-server online game

Abstract

Fast-paced action online games like First Person Shooters (FPS) pose high demands on resources and thus require multi-server architectures in order to scale to higher player numbers. However, their multi-server implementation is a challenging task: the game processing needs to be parallelized and the synchronization of the distributed game state needs to be efficiently implemented. As part of the European edutain@grid project 1, we are developing Real-Time Framework (RTF) -- a middleware that provides high-level support for the development of multi-server online games. This paper describes a case study on porting the open-source, single-server Quake 3 Arena game engine to a multi-server architecture using RTF and its state replication approach. We conducted extensive scalability and responsiveness experiments with the ported version of Quake 3 to evaluate the performance of our middleware. The experiments show that the responsiveness of RTF implementation can compete with the original Quake engine, and that the replication support allows to efficiently scale FPS games using multi-server processing.