VFC-RTS Aplicação do modelo VFC aos jogos de estratégia em tempo-real

Although MMOGs have been gaining most popularity over the years, RTS games have not been considerate a strong candidate for using this model because of the limited number of players supported for the usually employed network topologies, large number of game entities and strong consistency requirements. To deal with this situation, the notion of location-awareness can be extremely useful to confine the zones with consistency requirements. Existing interest managing techniques present visibility loses and intermittent object presence near the player’s area-of-interest, creating a confusing and annoying experience for the user. In this work we propose VFC-RTS, an adaptation of the VFC model, characterized for establishing consistency degrees, to the RTS scenario. This is especially relevant since in RTS games, game scenarios (e.g., battlefields) tend to be very large, populated with large number of game entities (soldiers, tanks, etc.) and players are engaged in multiple locations (e.g., battlefronts). We start by making an overview about the state-of-the-art in the fields of consistency maintenance, interest management and RTS games. Then we present our solution for the VFC-RTS system and propose an architecture for a generic middleware. Finally, we present our evaluation method for the implementation of the middleware.