Optimising Networked Multiplayer Games by Transferring Computation to Clients

Networked multiplayer video games have become enormously popular over the past two decades. Recently the capabilities of traditionally-designed game servers have begun to be outstripped by the demands of vast numbers of players, motivating re-thinking of the fundamental server design. This project proposes a novel architecture for highly scalable networked multiplayer games, and examines the potential for its practical application. The proposed architecture differs from traditional models in its distributed nature, being designed to harness the collective processing power of all connected clients rather than creating a performance bottleneck by consigning all game state calculations to one central server. A game server is implemented using this architecture, and its performance measured. The results indicate that the proposed distributed architecture can yield orders of magnitude performance improvements over a centralised architecture, with only minor additional networking overhead required. Such an architecture could therefore be utilised to improve the scalability of real-world games which use old-fashioned centralised designs.