Prof. Abdennour El Rhalibi Liverpool John Moores University, UK
The development of a modern MMOG is a challenging and costly process. MMOG are very large distributed applications, sharing very large states, and supporting communication between potentially thousands of player nodes. Despite the development of many solutions to define suitable architecture and communication protocols and enabling efficient deployment of these types of applications, many issues remains which still require a solution. In this talk we will discuss the issues relating to scalability in MMOGs and some of the main design choices that must be made when constructing a scalable MMOG including Load Balancing, Area of Interest Management (AoIM) schemes and the distribution and communication protocol which are to be applied. We introduce an updated survey of the state-of-the-art of AoIM and Load Balancing in Online Games. We identify keys issues in the development and deployment of such architectures and systems, and we analyze the main features of the state-of-the-art of existing solutions. The talk will provide a novel perspective in understanding the limitations of existing solutions and discussing the design criteria for an alternative approach to alleviate scalability, communication and security issues.
Biography
Abdennour El Rhalibi is Professor of Entertainment Computing and Head of Strategic Projects at Liverpool John Moores University. He is Head of Computer Games Research Lab at the Protect Research Centre. He has over 22 years’ experience doing research and teaching in Computer Sciences. Abdennour has worked as lead researcher in three EU projects in France and in UK. His current research involves Game Technologies and Applied Artificial intelligence. Abdennour has been leading for six years several projects in Entertainment Computing funded by the BBC and UK based games companies, involving cross-platform development tools for games, 3D Web-Based Game Middleware Development, State Synchronisation in Multiplayer Online Games, Peer-to-Peer MMOG and 3D Character Animation. Abdennour has published over 160 publications in these areas. Abdennour serves in many journal editorial boards including ACM Computer in Entertainment and the International Journal of Computer Games Technologies. He has served as chair and IPC member in over 100 conferences on Computer Entertainment, AI and VR. Abdennour is member of many International Research Committees in AI and Entertainment Computing, including IEEE MMTC IG: 3D Rendering, Processing and Communications (3DRPCIG), IEEE Task Force on Computational Intelligence in Video Games and IFIP WG 14.4 Games and Entertainment Computing.