Dynamic Bandwidth Throttling in a Client/Server Platform Shooter
Lecturer: Bart House, Microsoft
In Microsoft’s Live gaming environment, nearly all client/server based online titles are force to leverage one of a game player’s home connection as the server for the game. For games with large bandwidth requirements, such as online shooters, this introduces several problems. First, when your title provides automated matchmaking services how do you ensure that any game formed will have at least one player’s connection is capable hosting the game and how do you go about picking which player to use. Second, while the game is being played how do you vary bandwidth utilization to ensure that latencies are kept low while at the same time maximizing bandwidth use. Third, how do you manage the replication of game state when the available bandwidth is constantly changing. Finally, what do you do when a player’s home connection can no longer meet the minimum requirements to host a particular game. This talk will present solutions to these and other problems faced by Shadowrun in the Live gaming environment. The talk will start with a general overview of the networking architecture of Shadowrun, it will present the problems that we faced and the solutions that we implemented.
Intended Audience: Server programmers.
Prerequisites: Attendees should have a general knowledge of TCP/IP and a general understanding client server game architectures.
Format: Lecture
Date/Time: Friday, 3:00 PM
Room: Parliament
