Network Game Engine Load Balance Issues

This dissertation mostly studies the problem of load balancing in Massively Multiplayer Online Games. Research of MMOG is a great development prospects of large-scale online games. In such games, thousands of players are in a same virtual world in the same time. For responsing immediately to the information of players, system usually requires more servers to handle the information from all players in MMOG. So, a very important problem is how to effectively distribute players or find a effective load balancing algorithm. At present, the research of load balancing technology in MMOG is few. So, this research has important theoretical and practical signficance.In this paper, following the completion of work:1. Analysing detailedly the primary factors that must be considered in the design of the network games engine. Including the use of the distributed architecture, the choice of network protocol, classification of message and it's delivery strategy, and the use of cluster game servers. These factors produce very important infection to the performance of whole system. In addition, we introduces a familiar network games engine: RakNet. Analyzes the RakNet network engine which is used by the network system. Analyzes the advantage and disadvantage, the architecture of RakNet. In the following network engine system architechture, we will use RakNet as bottom module of the system.2. More in-depth studies in load balancing technology of the current network games. First, introduced the classification and realization technology of the load balancing algorithm in the general application. Second, detailedly introduced the characteristic of the load balancing technology in MMOG and some common algorithm.3. Proposing a based on game space partirion dynamic load balancing algorithm, this algorithm divides the whole game virtual world, and managed be several servers. Based on the concept of subscription region, by sending the request of assignning load, an overloaded server can transfer some of its load to other non-overloaded servers. In addition, a client migration scheme is proposed to reduce the overhead of this algorithm by extending the area of neighboring servers, that can improve system's response time and performance. 4. Based on the RakNet designned a network games engine system, the servers include a login server, a load balancing server and many game servers. Then, this system realized player's login, quit, and access servers, and the load balancing server realized some static load balancing algorithm.