CloudCraft: Cloud-based Data Management for MMORPGs

Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) are very sophisticated applications, which have significantly grown in popularity since their early days in the mid-90s. Along with growing numbers of users the require- ments on these systems have reached a point where technical problems become a severe risk for the commercial success. Within the CloudCraft project we investi- gate how Cloud-based architectures and data management can help to solve some of the most critical problems regarding scalability and consistency. In this article, we describe an implemented working environment based on the Cassandra DBMS and some of the key findings outlining its advantages and shortcomings for the given application scenario.

[1]  Yousaf Muhammad Evaluation and Implementation of Distributed NoSQL Database for MMO Gaming Environment , 2011 .

[2]  Rynson W. H. Lau,et al.  Supporting continuous consistency in multiplayer online games , 2004, MULTIMEDIA '04.

[3]  Leslie Lamport,et al.  Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system , 1978, CACM.

[4]  Jörg Kienzle,et al.  Mammoth: a massively multiplayer game research framework , 2009, FDG.

[5]  Johannes Gehrke,et al.  An Evaluation of Checkpoint Recovery for Massively Multiplayer Online Games , 2009, Proc. VLDB Endow..

[6]  Nancy A. Lynch,et al.  Brewer's conjecture and the feasibility of consistent, available, partition-tolerant web services , 2002, SIGA.

[7]  Shuo Wang,et al.  Cloud Data Management for Online Games: Potentials and Open Issues , 2013, Datenbank-Spektrum.

[8]  Daniel J. Abadi,et al.  Data Management in the Cloud: Limitations and Opportunities , 2009, IEEE Data Eng. Bull..

[9]  Rick Cattell,et al.  Scalable SQL and NoSQL data stores , 2011, SGMD.

[10]  Ziqiang Diao Consistency Models for Cloud-based Online Games: the Storage System's Perspective , 2013, Grundlagen von Datenbanken.

[11]  Johannes Gehrke,et al.  Fast checkpoint recovery algorithms for frequently consistent applications , 2011, SIGMOD '11.

[12]  Florian Irmert,et al.  Exploitation of event-semantics for distributed publish/subscribe systems in massively multiuser virtual environments , 2010, IDEAS '10.

[13]  Chun-Ying Huang,et al.  Game traffic analysis: an MMORPG perspective , 2005, NOSSDAV '05.

[14]  Mic Bowman,et al.  Survey of state melding in virtual worlds , 2012, CSUR.

[15]  Divyakant Agrawal,et al.  G-Store: a scalable data store for transactional multi key access in the cloud , 2010, SoCC '10.

[16]  Werner Vogels,et al.  Eventually consistent , 2008, CACM.

[17]  Brendan Burns Darkstar: the java game server , 2007 .

[18]  Kaiwen Zhang,et al.  Persistence in massively multiplayer online games , 2008, NETGAMES.

[19]  Johannes Gehrke,et al.  Database research opportunities in computer games , 2007, SGMD.

[20]  Alexandru Iosup,et al.  CAMEO: Enabling social networks for Massively Multiplayer Online Games through Continuous Analytics and cloud computing , 2010, 2010 9th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games.

[21]  Johannes Gehrke,et al.  BRRL: a recovery library for main-memory applications in the cloud , 2011, SIGMOD '11.

[22]  Kaiwen Zhang,et al.  Transaction Models for Massively Multiplayer Online Games , 2011, 2011 IEEE 30th International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems.

[23]  Johannes Gehrke,et al.  SEMMO: a scalable engine for massively multiplayer online games , 2008, SIGMOD Conference.

[24]  Michel Raynal,et al.  Timed consistency for shared distributed objects , 1999, PODC '99.

[25]  Jeff Carpenter,et al.  Cassandra: The Definitive Guide , 2010 .