Visibility-based microcells for dynamic load balancing in MMO games
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Date
2011-09-29
Authors
Sumila, Alexei
Keyword
Microcells , Load Balancing
Abstract
Massively multiplayer games allow hundreds of players to play and
interact with each other simultaneously. Due to the increasing need
to provide a greater degree of interaction to more players, load
balancing is critical on the servers that host the game. A common
approach is to divide the world into microcells (small regions of the
game terrain) and to allocate the microcells dynamically across
multiple servers.
We describe a visibility--based technique that guides the creation of
microcells and their dynamic allocation. This technique is designed
to reduce the amount of cross--server communication, in the hope of
providing better load balancing than other load--balancing strategies.
We hypothesize that reduction in expensive cross-server traffic will
reduce the overall load on the system. We employ horizon counts map
to create visibility based microcells, in order to emphasize primary
occluders in the terrain. In our testing we consider traffic over a
given quality of service threshold as the primary metric for minimization.
As result of our testing we find that dynamic load balancing produces
significant improvement in the frequency of quality of service failures.
We find that our visibility-based micro cells do not outperform
basic rectangular microcells discussed in earlier research. We also find
that cross-server traffic makes up a much smaller portion of overall message
load than we had anticipated, reducing the potential overall benefit from
cross server message optimisation.