[HAIFUX LECTURE] Massivizing OpenTTD: Distributed Computing Challenges and Quality Time -- Alexandru Iosup

[Eli Billauer]

On Monday, June 3rd at 18:30, Haifux will gather to hear a talk by 
Alexandru Iosup:

    Massivizing OpenTTD: Distributed Computing Challenges and Quality Time

Abstract

Hundreds of online games entertain over 250,000,000 online gamers in a 
maturing global market of over 30 billion Euros. A popular game genre is 
Real Time Strategy (RTS), which includes games such as StarCraft II (one 
of the best-selling games of 2010). Although Real-Time Strategy (RTS) 
games already entertain hundreds of millions of online players, the 
current games do not scale. For example, even popular RTS games such as 
the StarCraft series support in the same game instance only up to 16 
players and up to only 3-400 moving units. We present the rationale for 
and the design of a massively multiplayer online RTS (MMORTS) game, 
OpenTTD at large. OpenTTD at large is a derivative work from the popular 
open-source game OpenTTD, which in turn has derived from the economic 
simulator Transport Tycoon Deluxe.

We begin by analyzing the current technical and design limitations of 
OpenTTD--although this game can service its target audience of 8-16 
online players very well, scaling it to even hundreds of players is 
currently not possible.

We further present an approach to co-scale the platform and the design 
of OpenTTD, towards the OpenTTD at large MMORTS platform. We present here 
the new game design and three elements of our approach: a new approach 
for trading-off consistency for latency to support the future scalable 
game world, a game analytics back-end to support the future social 
component of the game design, and a mobile offloading system to support 
the future mobile component of the game platform.

(Warning: OpenTTD at large is ongoing work, and has many research and 
technical unknowns.)

The talk will be given in English.

TEAM: Alexandru Iosup (Project Lead/Pricipal Investigator), Otto Visser 
(Lead Dev/Lead Valorization), Siqi Shen (Lead Researcher), Yong Guo 
(Lead Researcher), Alexandru Olteanu (Lead Researcher), Marcin Biczak 
(Lead Dev/Researcher), Lucas van Dijk (Dev)

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We meet in Taub building, room 6. For instructions see:
http://www.haifux.org/where.html

Attendance is free, and you are all invited!

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Future lectures:

NOTE: The next meeting is just a week away!

10/06/13 ELVIS -- Efficient and Scalable Paravirtual I/O System:
          Abel Gordon

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We are always interested in hearing your talks and ideas. If you wish to 
give a talk, hold a discussion, or just plan some event haifux might be 
interested in, please contact us at webmaster at haifux.org

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Web: http://www.billauer.co.il