Journey, a Shared Virtual Space Middleware

Journey, a Shared Virtual Space MiddlewareThe complexity of developing multiplayer games, along with their popularity, has grown tremendously in the recent years. The most complex of these, Massively Multiplayer Games (MMOGs), require developers to deal with many issues, such as scalability, reliability and cheat prevention. In this work, we present Journey, a unified framework that addresses all these issues in a simple, modular and efficient architecture leveraging replicated objects.

The complexity of developing multiplayer games, along with their popularity, has grown tremendously in the recent years. The most complex of these, Massively Multiplayer Games (MMOGs), require developers to deal with many issues, such as scalability, reliability and cheat prevention.
In this work, we present Journey, a unified framework that addresses all these issues in a simple, modular and efficient architecture leveraging replicated objects. Scalability is addressed through the use of a dynamic cell load-balancing strategy while fault tolerance and cheat prevention are achieved by leveraging existing replicated objects in the system. The proposed framework is implemented using numerous enhancements not found in traditional replication, like obstacle-aware partitioning and remote procedure call systems.