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...implementation platform for online games. The platform design follows the on demand computing paradigm. It offers integration using open standards and off-the-shelf software and embraces virtualization and simplification to enable sharing resources across games. We describe our experience with identifying appropriate performance metrics for provisioning game servers and with implementing reusable platform components that provide useful functionality for a variety of games.
INTRODUCTION
The traditional approach taken by most publishers and providers of large-scale multiplayer online games is to install a dedicated infrastructure for each game. This approach has many drawbacks. It involves high risk and investment with little knowledge of how successful a new game will be. For example, an examination of subscriber populations of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) (1) shows that they all follow a similar life cycle (Figure 1), but predicting at launch how different titles will perform or how long their subscriber populations will continue growing remains challenging--player populations can experience sharp increases or drops in a period of just a few weeks.
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
Game publishers and developers face several "pain points" related to this problem:
* Sharing existing infrastructure across game titles--Repurposing servers, changing software stacks, and reconfiguring the network to accommodate a new game or function is often a cumbersome, manual process.
* Scaling the infrastructure in response to player demand--Adding and removing servers, support functions, or other resources is not automated.
* Managing a large, heterogeneous game server infrastructure--Server and network management is typically well outside the core competency of game providers.
The on demand business model proposed by IBM (2) addresses similar problems with business applications, where the issue of infrastructure cost strongly motivates new models for utility computing offerings. These models provide the flexibility to scale an application or service in response to user demand by rapidly adding or removing resources (e.g., servers, storage, databases, network bandwidth, etc.) from a pool that may be shared among multiple applications or customers. With an on demand infrastructure, online game providers could enjoy similar benefits by reducing initial investment, scaling rapidly according to demand, and adding new services. For example, an on demand infrastructure based on open standard grid technology (3) was proposed for hosting online games. (4)
In this paper, we describe our work to realize some of the major components of an on demand service platform for games. Our work is based on the premise that an on demand computing architecture can benefit game applications with some modifications and key additional game-specific services. We present a design and implementation that we believe serves the need of a number of classes of online games. Hence, this paper intends to provide a proof of concept that can be used as a starting point for designing and deploying an on demand gaming infrastructure.
We demonstrate the feasibility and operation of the platform by provisioning multiple instances of id Software Quake II **, a popular action game. Though Quake II falls in the category of server-based first-person shooter (FPS) games, the platform is applicable to a variety of game genres (e.g., distributed and single-server FPS, cluster-based massively multiplayer games, Web-based games, and game support services, such as lobbies, database servers, etc.). For example, traditional FPS games are played by a group of players on a single server, but if the game becomes very popular, additional (disconnected) copies of the game "map" can be deployed by provisioning additional servers on demand. Newer game architectures distribute the game map across multiple servers so that resources can be added to support a larger number of players in a seamless world. (5,6) The "shard" (or realm) model used in most MMPORGs similarly can benefit from this approach by adding or removing servers in a cluster managing a single shard automatically as the shard population grows or shrinks.
GAMES SERVICE PLATFORM ARCHITECTURE
In this section we discuss the design of the service platform and follow with an overview of the current prototype architecture.
Design objectives
The service platform design follows several basic principles. First, the platform and associated services should be minimally intrusive to the game applications and, at the same time, still provide value to game providers by relieving them from managing the system infrastructure. A platform must be general enough to support many types of games (so that it can be shared), yet still be able to be tailored when necessary by an individual game publisher. A second possibility that follows from this is a modular platform architecture which allows game publishers to take advantage of functions that address their needs and forego others that may not be as relevant. Finally, to ensure the flexibility and extensibility of the platform, open standards and open-source tools should be used wherever possible, consistent with the principles of the On Demand Operating Environment (ODOE). (7)
The objectives just described are somewhat idealized, and our current prototype does not meet all of them. Nonetheless, our implementation represents a first step toward realizing an ODOE for games.
Logical platform architecture
Figure 2 shows the logical relationships of each of the architecture components. Conceptually, the platform may be thought of as a layered architecture, with upper layers comprising application-level services and lower layers acting as system-level services. At the bottom is the hardware and networking infrastructure, consisting of shared clusters of game servers, database servers, proxies, content servers, and wide area network (WAN) connectivity. We show two sets of server clusters to emphasize that the platform is not limited to residing in a single data center. As the number and distribution of players and games grows, the platform may be deployed in multiple hosting locations.
[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]
Above the infrastructure layer are the main system-level services, which consist of non-game-specific functions, such as server and network monitoring and server provisioning. These functions are generally useful for any game and for many auxiliary game functions. Server provisioning will be customized to install specific application code, but the basic provisioning operation--for example, on demand installation of a software stack on a target server--is common to most game applications. The first two layers (i.e., distributed server clusters and server and network management) are also applicable to other...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
have been removed from this article.
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