Peer-to-peer support for instance-based massively multiplayer games

Massively Multiplayer Online Games are a growing segment on the game industry, combining the excitement of 3D games with the opportunity of playing with thousands of players worldwide. The common network model used is a straightforward client/server one, where all the simulation and events are processed on the server. This creates a bottleneck on the server-side, and harshly affects the scalability of the whole system. When the broadband technologies available today and the increase in the number of players are considered, the server’s complexity and size grows significantly, becoming too costly. One approach being proposed to overcome those difficulties is to change the network model into a P2P (Peer-to-Peer) model. In this article we propose a P2P network model that tries to provide scalability and security. We first examine in more details the disadvantages of the client-server model. After that, we talk about the instanced game model, which is the game model support by our software architecture. Finally, we describe the organization of our solution, and some interesting points about it and others solutions proposed.