Research On Consistency Maintenance Of Continuous Net Games And Its Experiment Platform

Consistency maintenance is one of the kernel problems in net game research. It is the basic technology for availability and fairness of net game. There are two kinds of net games, discrete net games and continuous net games. For the consistency maintenance of discrete net games, it is well studied. But there are still many problems to be solved for the consistency maintenance of continuous net games. Local lag and dead-reckoning (DR) algorithm are two common methods for consistency maintenance, but both of them have some shortcomings for continuous net games.This paper proposes a quantitative definition of consistency in continuous application, and discusses the features of consistency in continuous net games. The main contribution of this paper is that it proposes a new consistency maintenance algorithm called globally synchronized dead-reckoning with local lag (GS-DR-LL). This algorithm absolves the idea of local lag and puts this idea into globally synchronized DR (GS-DR) algorithm. The new algorithm can maintain higher consistency than GS-DR algorithm. We implemented GS-DR and GS-DR-LL in a simple net game called Spaceship and did experiments of 12 different settings with different thresholds, network delays and local lags for GS-DR-LL. The results show that in any settings of the experiment, GS-DR-LL algorithm always maintains higher consistency than GS-DR algorithm.This paper also provides some researches and improvements on the experiment platform for verifying algorithms in continuous net games. We isolate the common logic which is unrelated with specific games and consistency maintenance algorithm, and combine it and experiment platform configuration service together into the experiment framework. The framework is reusable and flexible. We build the whole experiment system based on the framework quickly and easily.