| A real-time massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) is a networked computer or video game in which tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of consumers may interact with one another in real-time in a shared environment, even though these users may be separated by vast geographic distances. Game industry analysis highlights trends indicating that online game usage and market penetration will grow significantly over the next five to ten years. As such, game developers and entertainment companies seek to offer subscription based mass-market online games. However, the risks, costs and complexity involved in the successful development and operation of a scalable online game service are high, in part due to lack of well established and understood models for the network software architecture of such a product. This thesis explores the literature and research regarding distributed military simulation, academic networked virtual environments, and commercial online gaming in search of patterns for network software architectures which are applicable to massively multiplayer online games. It is the hope of the author to contribute to this cross pollination of ideas by providing a thorough review of the techniques and approaches for the design and implementation of large scale distributed systems having properties similar to those found in a massively multiplayer online game system. In this way, perhaps the cost, complexity, and risk involved in building a massively multiplayer online game service can be reduced. |
