Scaling multiplayer online games using proxy-server replication: a case study of Quake 2

Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) are an increasingly popular class of real-time interactive distributed applications that require scalable architectures and parallelization approaches. While games of the role-playing genre already allow thousands of users to concurrently participate in a single game session, there are important genres, in particular action and strategy games, which have not been scaled to the massively multiplayer realm so far. These games have hard requirements in terms of scalability, in particular regarding density: many players tend to congregate in small locations. In this paper, we outline our novel approach of replication-based parallelisation for scaling the density of players. The practical impact of our work is demonstrated by porting the popular action game QFusion, based on the famous Quake 2, onto our proxy-server system architecture using the replication approach. The experiments with the ported QFusion demonstrate its high responsiveness and show that our approach allows to almost triple the maximum number of simultaneous players on four servers as compared with a single-server version.