Adaptive consistency for replicated state in real-time-strategy multiplayer games.

ABSTRACTAlthough massive multiplayer online games have been gaining most popularity over the years, real-time strategy (RTS) has not been considerate a strong candidate for using this model because of the limited number of players supported, large number of game entities and strong consistency requirements. To deal with this situation, concepts such as continuous consistency and location-awareness have proven to be extremely useful in order to confine areas with consistency requirements. The combination between these two concepts results on a powerful technique in which the player's location and divergence boundaries are directly linked, providing the player the most accurate information about objects inside his area-of-interest. The VFC model achieves a balance between the notions of continuous consistency and location-awareness by defining multiple zones of consistency around the player's location (pivot) with different divergence boundaries. In this work we propose VFC-RTS, an adaptation of the VFC model, characterized for establishing consistency degrees, to the RTS scenario. We describe how the concepts of the original VFC model were adapt to the RTS paradigm and propose an architecture for a generic middleware. Later, we apply our solution to an open source, multi-platform RTS game with full consistency requirements and evaluate the results to define the success of this work.