Object Placement in Distributed Multiplayer Games

We propose two distributed optimization heurisitics for object placement in a distributed environment, and evaluate the communication cost incurred by several object placement strategies in the context of distributed First Person Shooter multiplayer games. We show that our heurisitics do as well or better than placement strategies that place objects statically or partition objects based on game region, achieving relatively low communication cost, even load distribution, and a lower migration frequency. Our estimates show that such a system could be used on servers with symmetric 1.5Mbps links and would incur a global communication cost of less than 3 times that of using a single server.