The Design And Development Of Distributed Network Game And Research On Interrelated Techniques

The network game popularization has brought the new profit point ofgrowth for IT, more and more merchants and players join in the networkgame. Naturally, the network game development has also become the popularsoftware industry.A game is composed of the game engine and some correlative gameresources. These resources include sound, picture, text and so on. Amongthem, the sound includes music and chord effect, the picture includescharacter, stage prop, map, background and so on, the text includes script, aswell as many kinds of documents like map document, script document andconfiguration document and so on which the game needed. Therefore a gamemanufacture must include these main steps, plan, art design, programming,test and issue.Only speaking of computer technology, a integrated game involves thedatabase, network communications, encryption and decryption, distributedand server software development, artificial intelligence, graph imagetechnology and so on. Its programming knowledge involves the networkprogramming, the operating system programming, the graph imageprogramming (DirectX/OpenGL), WIN32 API programming (based onWINDOWS system), as well as data structure and algorithm and so on.The network game technology mainly manifests in its programmingdevelopment aspect, including the game engine development, the game firstand the middle-level programming, the server and the client detail, the screenexpression and so on. Game engine development determines whether theentire game is successful or not. The network game may adopt two kinds ofdifferent network infrastructure, central architecture and distributedarchitecture. And the central architecture is mostly used at present, it isadvantageous to the game consistency, and it has security and the maturecommercial operation pattern. But the central architecture has a long responsetime, the server is easy to become bottleneck to the whole system. Thedistributed architecture has solved the central architecture's shortcoming, ifthe distributed architecture could realize the functions the central serverimplementes, the game pattern more beneficial to commercial would beproduced. Based on this reason more and more people started network gameresearch based on the distributed architecture.This paper designs and develops a network game based on the distributedarchitecture with central sever, it has realized the basic functions which anetwork game has, including player's registering, entering, walking andchatting in the game process, as well as scene cut and trap encounter. Basedon this foundation, the paper investigates the design of distributedarchitecture, the implementation of the game main modules and thepath-finding algorithm of the dynamic road network.At first the paper introduces the network game development history andthe network game categories, and then elaborates the paper background,introduces computer technology used in the network game programming, aswell as its network infrastructure, including the explanation and analysis ofthe central architecture and the distributed architecture, research history ofthe distributed network game.At the stage of system design and development, the paper carries on theentire design to the system, in which has contained the map editor, the centralserver and the game client. The map editor is the essential auxiliaryimplement, the paper designs and develops it to make map which the gameneeded, it has realized map reading, saving, event and trap setting;Thecentral server is a main part of the distributed architecture, it manages gameaccount and the game world resources, the paper adopts completes port I/Omodel for network infrastructure;In the game client design, the paperpresents a kind of development model based on three levels structure, themodel divides the game client program development into three levelstructures, the lowest level is the engine level, namely the game enginesystem development, the second is the game level, namely the game logicalsystem and the communications protocol design and the development, theuppermost layer is the performance level, namely design development ofgame surface and user interface based on the two levels. Then, the paperanalyses, designs and programs the game system main module. After that, thepaper elaborates the game engine design and development, the paper analysesgame engine various subsystems, including 2D graph system, I/O system,config system, music sound effect system, text system, interface system andartificial intelligence system.After that, the paper analyzes and investigates the distributed architectureand the role path-finding algorithm. In the distributed architecture, the paperelaborates its design reason, idea and scheme, then separately describes thedesign and the implementation of the correspondence structure and the flowof the central server and the game client. In path-finding algorithm at thegame, the paper introduces directly computing algorithm and D* algorithmfor dynamic road network, then analyzes two kinds of path-findingalgorithms, at last the paper presents a kind of path-finding algorithm basedon the character state automaton for dynamic road network, and describes thedesign, implementation and evaluation, and compares the path-finding speed,path-finding steps and the search points of the three algorithms through theexperiment.The entire network game design is based on the scalability, rapid responsetime and robustness of distributed architecture, the consistency and securityof central architecture. Among each module has the relative independency, itis easily expanded for function and performance. The resources of the gamemostly come from the Internet. Because the author ability is limited, thepaper needs to be improved and perfected in many aspects such as the gameplot and the scene, the game engine and the distributed architecture.