RTF: a real-time framework for developing scalable multiplayer online games

  • Authors:

  • Frank Glinka;Alexander Ploß;Jens Müller-lden;Sergei Gorlatch

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Münster, Germany;University of Münster, Germany;University of Münster, Germany;University of Münster, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Network and system support for games
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

This paper presents a middleware system called RTF (Real-Time Framework) which aims at supporting the development of modern real-time online games. The RTF automatically distributes the game state among participating servers, and supports parallel state update computations, as well as efficient communication and synchronization between game servers and clients. The game developers access the RTF via a comfortable interface that offers a considerably higher level of abstraction than the time-consuming and error-prone programming in C++ with socket-based communication. We describe the structure of the RTF system and its current proof-of-concept implementation which supports the multi-server parallelization concepts of zoning, instancing and replication for real-time online games. The novel feature of the RTF is the combination of these three concepts which allows the developer to create large, seamless virtual worlds and to migrate zones between servers.