Maintaining Consistency in Distributed Network Games

Abstract

There are basically two approaches, conservative and optimistic, to maintain consistency in distributed network games. In the former, players may experience network latency, depending on packet transfer delay, caused by the send-and-wait frame and acknowledgement packets. In the latter approaches, the processes do not wait for other players' packets and advance to their own frames, hence no network latency. However, when inconsistency happens the processes must roll back. These can cause irritation and confusion to players. Overall, the optimistic approaches may not be suitable for networked games. To overcome the network latency problem in the conservative approaches, this paper introduces a network system which can reduce network latency and bandwidth by utilizing packet-relay and shortest path algorithms. Furthermore, game efficiency comparison between lock-step and bucket-synchronization algorithms on the proposed network system is presented in this paper.