Author(s) : Grenville Armitage, Mark Claypool, Philip Branch
Publisher : Wiley
Year : Apr 2006
ISBN 10 : 0470018577
ISBN 13 : 9780470018576
Language : English
Pages : 232
File type : PDF
Size : 3.5 MB
Today, computer games are sold to an increasingly significant market whose annual revenues already exceed that of the Hollywood movie industry. Multi-player games are making greater use of the Internet and the driving demand for ‘better than dial-up’ access services in the consumer space. Yet many networking engineers are unfamiliar with the games that utilise their networks, as game designers are often unsure of how the Internet really behaves.
Regardless of whether you are a network engineer, technical expert, game developer, or student with interests across these fields, this book will be a valuable addition to your library. We bring together knowledge and insights into the ways multi-party/multi-player games utilise the Internet and influence traffic patterns on the Internet. Multi-player games impose loads on Internet Service Providers (ISPs) quite unlike the loads generated by email, web surfing or streaming content.
People’s demand for realistic interactivity creates somewhat unique demands at the network level for highly reliable and timely exchange of data across the Internet – something the Internet rarely offers because of its origins as a ‘best effort’ service. Game designers have developed fascinating techniques to maintain a game’s illusion of shared experiences even when the underlying network is losing data and generally misbehaving.
