Scalability, fast response time, and low cost are of utmost importance in designing a successful massively multiplayer online game. The underlying architecture plays an important role in meeting these conditions. Peer-to-peer architecture can lower the cost and achieve high scalability out of their distributed and collaborative nature. They can also achieve fast response times by creating direct connections between players. However, peer-to-peer architectures also face many challenges to run for MMO. Furthermore, there are other communication architectures and data control architectures that have been used for MMO with their unique characteristics, such as server-network, replicated, and centralized.

The analysis and comparison of different networking architecture and P2P video games has been done and shown to reduce the restrictions imposed by the servers to the players. However, each there are a few papers that compare multiple approaches proposed by researchers. Therefore, we will analyze those approaches and compare with other modern widely-used network architectures. The approach we plan to take with this paper is a survey style P2P net in-game by comparing it with other networking architectures. Our focus is mainly on MMO games because it contains more challenging aspects. We will explore existing systems and protocols proposed and used in a modern peer-to-peer network in game. Then analyze how the number of the expected players will affect the design of the protocol and what is the best.

Week 5-6 (2/8 - 2/21)

Kouki - Gather and summarize paper on P2P MMO game

Kaimin - Gather and summarize paper on other network architecture for MMO

Anthonese - Gather and summarize paper on history of P2P game network

Week 7-8(2/22 - 3/7 Midterm presentation)

Read through papers which other two have gathered, then analyze how P2P and other network architecture games are different in terms of performance, error, connection, cheating...etc. List down the advantages and disadvantages of each structure, and write up powerpoint and record presentations.

Week 9-10(3/8 - 3/21)

Kouki - Write introduction, system model, related work sections.

Kaimin - Write modeling and analysis section.

Anthonese - Write Performance and discussion sections.

Week 11 - 12(3/22 - 4/7)

All work on presentation recording.

After that, every member will read through the paper and finalize it.

Week 12-end

Finish up the paper together