A Hybrid Scheme for Massive Multiplayer Online Games Using Mobile Agent on Dynamic Quadtree Architecture

Abstract

Unlike the traditional online game infrastructure—the central server approach, we propose a hybrid scheme for multiplayer online games in this paper. This scheme effectively combines the peer-to-peer model and client-server model to solve the problems of scalability, performance and cost limitation. This scheme is suitable for online games playing in a geographical area in which the online player community is organized into quadtree architecture. A central master server is kept for login, dispatching the players and solving the trouble if there is some problems happened in the virtual world. The cost of the game servers are passed to the honored members in the community. Due to new players moving into or old players moving out of a region, a local game server loading may reach a limit, or only a few players still stay in its controlled area. Thus, a local game server may need to have a child local server to share its loading, or to be retired. In the other words, the quadtree is managed dynamically. The branches of quadtree will be extended or retracted depends on the distribution of the online players. A local game server can spawn a new local server or can be replaced by a new local server. When a new local game server is created, the game server source codes will be loaded into it. Like a mobile agent, the local game server is mobilized.