In 2008 I undertook a project entitled “Creation of a MORPG framework using Apache MINA and jMonkeyEngine” as part of my final year at university. The aim of this project was to effectively take what I had learned and turn it into a legitimate project, and investigate the viability of the game engine jMonkeyEngine for our game client. While this project worked to an extent, and in fact won me the Best Student Project 2008/9, I decided that jMonkeyEngine was providing much more than I needed or wanted. The original plan had been to continue work on the project after university, however after my dissertation was completed the project was dropped.

This year I decided to revisit the project, and started work on a new game client – this time avoiding any existing game engines, and making direct use of OpenGL (though JOGL). In the future I may try and write some blog posts with technical details or plans, however for now I just wanted to post a few screen-shots to prove it is at least vaguely working…

Abstract – We present an approach to support massively multi-player games on peer-to-peer overlays. Our approach exploits the fact that players in MMGs display locality of interest, and therefore can form self-organizing groups based on their locations in the virtual world. To this end, we have designed scalable mechanisms to distribute the game state to the participating players and to maintain consistency in the face of node failures. The resulting system dynamically scales with the number of online players. It is more flexible and has a lower deployment cost than centralized games servers. We have implemented a simple game we call SimMud, and experimented with up to 4000 players to demonstrate the applicability of this approach.