Yesterday, I had to defend my thesis topic in front of committee of my peers. At McGill, it’s called the thesis proposal defense. No problem, the defense went well and I passed the test. This means I only need to finish my implementation, run some experiments and write a thesis. Shouldn’t be too hard.
I just realized that I never really talked about my research in this blog. Sparing you the blow-by-blow description, I can still give an overview of what I am doing.
The first piece of the puzzle is Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG), videogames where thousands of players play a game in a shared virtual world. Making these games is an incredible difficult task, given the complexity of the technical challenges developers must face. Three of these challenges are scalability, reliability and cheater prevention.
Given that thousands of people play these games together, the technology has to scale to allow for that many players. It’s an impressive challenge, given that most multiplayer technology is designed for 16, 32 or 64 players. Reliability is key in these games, as players don’t enjoy being disconnected from the game server. Cheaters are also a serious problem, as they prevent honest players from enjoying themselves.
There exists individual solutions for each of these challenges, but very little has been done to solve these problems in a unified way. My research is to use replicated object technology to solve these problems in a unified way. I will then run experiments using Mammoth to see how fast and efficient is my solution. Might not sound very exciting, but it’s a pretty cool challenge.
Congratulations. I hope you will tell us more about your research in the future.