Interest management middleware for networked games

Abstract

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.