This week in our networking class is student chosen papers based on research in applications. After looking at internet measurement and p2p papers, I settled on a p2p paper from Microsoft Research that focused on improving Halo, well online games (and other latency-sensitive p2p systems) in general, but they did use Halo to come up with their latency prediction system, Htrae (Earth backwards, home of Bizarro and his friends from the DC comics universe).
The basic idea is that the system uses geolocation as an initial condition to a network coordinate system that uses spherical coordinates to map every Xbox to a virtual Earth, a method known as geographic bootstrapping. The point of Htrae is to improve matchmaking so that latency between players is reduced, thereby reducing in game lag.
Reducing the lag in an online games is important, especially in the popular first person shooter games, because lag could essentially mean you are killed before you even see the person that kills you. That, of course, would affect your view of how "fun" the game is and, since online gaming is a huge million (or even billion) dollar industry, you would find a new game that has less lag.
Although I do not know if Htrae is actually being used in any of the current games available today, the recently released Halo Reach (prequel to the original Halo game) is the most likely candidate. Halo Reach allows players to select certain preferences (such as improved matchmaking for skill level, etc.) by increasing the matchmaking time. The default matchmaking time (labeled as the fastest method) most likely incorporates Htrae, as it was published by Microsoft Game Studios.
Although many feel video games are a waste of time, there is no denying that they have substantial influence in pushing forward research in various areas of computer science. I have mainly read about improvements in graphics and AI, so it was interesting to see video games helping to push the envelope in terms of networking research.
No comments:
Post a Comment