Latency and player actions in online games

Claypool, Mark; Claypool, Kajal T.

doi:10.1145/1167838.1167860

Cited by 451 publications

(294 citation statements)

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“…However, it takes too much time to calculate it depending on the number of users [4]. The user tolerant in MORPG is 500 msec or less [10]. The longer calculation time is not feasible.…”

Section: Meta-heuristic Algorithmmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Meta-Heuristic Approach for Dynamic Data Allocation on a Multiple Web Server System

Kohana

Okamoto

Ikegami

2013

IEICE Trans. Inf. & Syst.

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Masaki KOHANA †a) , Shusuke OKAMOTO †b) , Members, and Atsuko IKEGAMI †c) , Nonmember SUMMARYThis paper describes a near-optimal allocation method for web-based multi-player online role-playing games (MORPGs), which must be able to cope with a large number of users and high frequency of user requests. Our previous work introduced a dynamic data reallocation method. It uses multiple web servers and divides the entire game world into small blocks. Each ownership of block is allocated to a web server. Additionally, the ownership is reallocated to the other web server according to the user's requests. Furthermore, this block allocation was formulated as a combinational optimization problem. And a simulation based experiment with an exact algorithm showed that our system could achieve 31% better than an ad-hoc approach. However, the exact algorithm takes too much time to solve a problem when the problem size is large. This paper proposes a meta-heuristic approach based on a tabu search to solve a problem quickly. A simulation result shows that our tabu search algorithm can generate solutions, whose average correctness is only 1% different from that of the exact algorithm. In addition, the average calculation time for 50 users on a system with five web servers is about 25.67 msec while the exact algorithm takes about 162 msec. An evaluation for a web-based MORPG system with our tabu search shows that it could achieve 420 users capacity while 320 for our previous system. key words: web-based application, dynamic data allocation, tabu search algorithm

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“…However, it takes too much time to calculate it depending on the number of users [4]. The user tolerant in MORPG is 500 msec or less [10]. The longer calculation time is not feasible.…”

Section: Meta-heuristic Algorithmmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Meta-Heuristic Approach for Dynamic Data Allocation on a Multiple Web Server System

Kohana

Okamoto

Ikegami

2013

IEICE Trans. Inf. & Syst.

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“…Users tolerate interaction latencies up to 80 ms for gaming [4] and up to 150 ms for office applications [38]. Wireless links, however, often introduce propagation delays in the order of tens of milliseconds [39,40] and the total latency is further increased by client and server processing, router queuing, firewall processing etc.…”

Section: Client Side Handling Of User Inputmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimized mobile thin clients through a MPEG-4 BiFS semantic remote display framework

Simoens

Joveski

Gardenghi

et al. 2011

Multimed Tools Appl

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Abstract. According to the thin client computing principle, the user interface is physically separated from the application logic. In practice only a viewer component is executed on the client device, rendering the display updates received from the distant application server and capturing the user interaction. Existing remote display frameworks are not optimized to encode the complex scenes of modern applications, which are composed of objects with very diverse graphical characteristics. In order to tackle this challenge, we propose to transfer to the client, in addition to the binary encoded objects, semantic information about the characteristics of each object. Through this semantic knowledge, the client is enabled to react autonomously on user input and does not have to wait for the display update from the server. Resulting in a reduction of the interaction latency and a mitigation of the bursty remote display traffic pattern, the presented framework is of particular interest in a wireless context, where the bandwidth is limited and expensive. In this paper, we describe a generic architecture of a semantic remote display framework. Furthermore, we have developed a prototype using the MPEG-4 Binary Format for Scenes to convey the semantic information to the client. We experimentally compare the bandwidth consumption of MPEG-4 BiFS with existing, non-semantic, remote display frameworks. In a text editing scenario, we realize an average reduction of 23 % of the data peaks that are observed in remote display protocol traffic.

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“…In Fig. 1a, we have drawn a line at 500 ms to show how many streams experienced latencies that would degrade the players' QoE severely [7]. The graph shows that nearly half of the measured streams during this hour of game-play had such latency events.…”

Section: Reliability and Congestion Controlmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…With respect to user satisfaction, games require tight timeliness, with latency thresholds at approximately 100 ms for first-person shooter (FPS) games, 500 ms for role-playing games (RPG) and 1000 ms for real-time strategy games [7]. Analysis of other game genres (FPS and RPG) shows that they also show similar networking patterns with high interarrival times and small packets, reflecting the human interaction present in the games.…”

Section: Thin-stream Applicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The rigidity of the former requirement will vary from application to application, but if the maximum tolerable value is consistently exceeded, the quality of experience (QoE) will degrade accordingly. A wide range of applications require latencies below 500 ms, and even the most delay-tolerant of these time-dependent applications suffer heavily when the delay approaches one second [7,14].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Improving SCTP retransmission delays for time-dependent thin streams

Petlund

Beskow

Pedersen

et al. 2009

Multimed Tools Appl

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A large number of network services rely on IP and reliable transport protocols. For applications that provide abundant data for transmission, loss is usually handled satisfactorily, even if the application is latency-sensitive (Wang et al. 2004). For data streams where small packets are sent intermittently, however, applications can occasionally experience extreme latencies (Griwodz and Halvorsen 2006). As it is not uncommon that such thin-stream applications are time-dependent, any unnecessarily induced delay can have severe consequences for the service provided. Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) are a defining example of thin streams. Many MMOGs (like World of Warcraft and Age of Conan) use TCP for the benefits of reliability, in-order delivery and NAT/firewall traversal. It has been shown that TCP has several shortcomings with respect to the latency requirements of thin streams because of the way it handles retransmissions (Griwodz and Halvorsen 2006). As such, an alternative to TCP may be SCTP (Stewart et al. 2000), which was originally developed to meet the requirements of signaling transport. In this paper, we evaluate the Linux-kernel SCTP implementation in the context of thin streams. To address the identified latency challenges, we propose sender-side only enhancements that reduce the application-layer latency in a manner that is compatible with unmodified receivers. These enhancements can be switched on by applications and are used only when the system identifies the stream as thin. To evaluate the latency performance, we have performed several tests over various real networks and over an emulated network, varying parameters like RTT, packet loss and amount of competing cross traffic. When comparing our modifications with SCTP on Linux and FreeBSD and TCP New Reno, our results show great latency improvements and indicate the need for a separate handling of thin and thick streams.

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Latency and player actions in online games

Abstract: Latency determines not only how players experience online gameplay but also how to design the games to mitigate its effects and meet player expectations.

Cited by 451 publications

References 10 publications

A Meta-Heuristic Approach for Dynamic Data Allocation on a Multiple Web Server System

A Meta-Heuristic Approach for Dynamic Data Allocation on a Multiple Web Server System

Optimized mobile thin clients through a MPEG-4 BiFS semantic remote display framework

Improving SCTP retransmission delays for time-dependent thin streams

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