Comment Feed for Microsoft Research TechFest - Using P2P to speed up multiplayer gaming (and other things) (Rory on Channel 9)

Re: Microsoft Research TechFest - Using P2P to speed up multiplayer gaming (and other things)

Krampster — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 20:13:21 GMT

Interesting idea, but it doesn't sound that groundbreaking. It's just advanced prediction, and advanced prioritization, right?

BTW, you can skip the first 10 minutes of the video, which is too chatty, with little substance.

Re: Microsoft Research TechFest - Using P2P to speed up multiplayer gaming (and other things)

Massif — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 11:11:18 GMT

The conversation reminds me that some friends of mine tried to play Quake 3 multiplayer using a serial modem.

It turns out COM ports don't really provide a huge amount of bandwidth and aren't fast, so their ping was of the several second margin.

Apparantly when you get shot the game would try to drag you back to the place you were when the other player shot you. They could even try and fight against it. This made for prolonged movie style "Nooooo" moments as they desperately tried to resist the dragging, and eventually when they arrived at their destination they'd explode.

Quite funny really.

Re: Microsoft Research TechFest - Using P2P to speed up multiplayer gaming (and other things)

raymond — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 01:24:52 GMT

Sampy wrote:
Fix'd

I'm so smart

Thanks for fixing it.

Enjoyed video.

Re: Microsoft Research TechFest - Using P2P to speed up multiplayer gaming (and other things)

Mike Sampson — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 17:26:26 GMT

Fix'd

I'm so smart :P

Re: Microsoft Research TechFest - Using P2P to speed up multiplayer gaming (and other things)

Mike Sampson — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 16:19:06 GMT

Let me head over to the streaming server farm and kick the side of the box.

That should fix it...

Sampy
Video Processing Guy

Re: Microsoft Research TechFest - Using P2P to speed up multiplayer gaming (and other things)

RoyalSchrubber — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 12:23:03 GMT

I
WANT
IT
:D

Seriously, the joint of this technology and crysis would just rock.

Re: Microsoft Research TechFest - Using P2P to speed up multiplayer gaming (and other things)

jsampsonPC — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 04:20:56 GMT

funkster_smokey wrote:
Hi,

I am facing some difficulties in watching this video? (No Video streaming only audio!)

Regards,
Jadeja Dushyantsinh A.

We pretty much all had that problem. If you copy the download location from the "Download" option, and paste it into Windows Media Player, it'll buffer and play with video and audio :)

Rory is out of town right now, or else that strapping lad would have already gotten us taken care of I'm sure :)

Re: Microsoft Research TechFest - Using P2P to speed up multiplayer gaming (and other things)

funkster_smokey — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 04:13:07 GMT

Hi,

I am facing some difficulties in watching this video? (No Video streaming only audio!)

Regards,
Jadeja Dushyantsinh A.

Re: Microsoft Research TechFest - Using P2P to speed up multiplayer gaming (and other things)

Richard.Hein — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 15:13:25 GMT

Conceptually simple and beautiful ideas, great interview! :D

Re: Microsoft Research TechFest - Using P2P to speed up multiplayer gaming (and other things)

mopos — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 11:47:32 GMT

Rory, buy your shirts a size bigger. Other than that, great interview :)

Re: Microsoft Research TechFest - Using P2P to speed up multiplayer gaming (and other things)

Jhaks — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 11:43:30 GMT

Chadk wrote:

Btw. we already have MASSIVE multiplayer games. Eve online have up to 33k players online at peak times. Its really amazing.

But if objects are managed by the conneted peers, wouldnt there be a potetional problem where the unit would change the actual location of the object that it manage, giving the player an unfair advantage?

These massive multiplayer games aren't really massive because the players do not coexist at the same time in the same place. It works because players don't reside in the same local place and also because the game root servers are run on large server farms that have much higher bandwidth than end systems. With shooter games one of the clients acts as the server which means the server's processing power and bandwidth are the bottleneck. Shooters can also use p2p like in the video, but then again the bottleneck is the upload of each peer and the amount of coexisting players.

The problem with inconsistency came to my mind too. It seems the focus groups does a good job fixing the problem by allocating more bandwidth to characters that are in focus.

Re: Microsoft Research TechFest - Using P2P to speed up multiplayer gaming (and other things)

Jhaks — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 11:30:14 GMT

prencher wrote:

The download works perfectly, its the streaming one thats barfed.

Excellent interview, though what about NAT related P2P issues? Most people don't have inbound ports opened, so how do you get around that?

Haza! That's where Vista can comes in with it's Teredo technology, which is an ipv4 to ipv6 transition technology. It allows for automatic NAT traversal if you are hooked up to an IPv4 gateway. If you have Vista you can try this out in the Window Meeting Space application. It's a p2p app that uses teredo and lets you transfer files and also share desktops directly without needing to configure the NAT.

I thought the focus groups where really smart. People complain a lot that they're getting killed because their connection sucks. If the bots are utilized to much people might say the game is somewhat unfair. The focus group is a great way to fix the problem.

I just though of something that could apply to distributed gaming too. In my networks course we were talking about multicasting that is in development for applications like IPTV. With something like IPTV with traditional unicasting the TV server would need to send the video to each and every client. If there are millions of clients, the server upload bandwidth quickly becomes the bottleneck. One solution is IP Multicasting where there is packet replication and branching at the network level. Essentially a tree is constructed where the server is the root, internal nodes are routers and the leafs are clients. The root server would send video to a few routers, these routers would further send to other routers and eventually this branching tree would get to the client. More packet duplication occurs starting the periphery of the network so the overall bandwidth is more evenly distributed. I can see this applying to multiplayer games really well since it seems the upload capacity is the bottleneck. If a player is sending state update info to everyone there is a large unessecary duplication of packets at the source when this duplication could be done closer to the clients at different routers. Combining this with the type of technology mentioned in the video it would seem you could have even larger sets of coexisting characters while also relying less on bots. Too bad multicasting seems so far away in terms of depoloyment. Well at least people can look forward to the tech mentioned in the video.

Re: Microsoft Research TechFest - Using P2P to speed up multiplayer gaming (and other things)

Chadk — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 11:12:03 GMT

Rory wrote:
Argh.

It was working before I left Redmond (in Portland now).

Argh, argh, argh...

Is it working for anyone?

HEY - EVNET GUYS - MAKE TEH INTARWEBS WORK!!!!1111!!

Nope - its broked!

But if you stream the download version, it works! :)

Seems like the video is speeded a bit up tho. BUt not that it matters!

Btw. we already have MASSIVE multiplayer games. Eve online have up to 33k players online at peak times. Its really amazing.

But if objects are managed by the conneted peers, wouldnt there be a potetional problem where the unit would change the actual location of the object that it manage, giving the player an unfair advantage?

Re: Microsoft Research TechFest - Using P2P to speed up multiplayer gaming (and other things)

prencher — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 08:27:05 GMT

Rory wrote:
Argh.

It was working before I left Redmond (in Portland now).

Argh, argh, argh...

Is it working for anyone?

HEY - EVNET GUYS - MAKE TEH INTARWEBS WORK!!!!1111!!

The download works perfectly, its the streaming one thats barfed.

Excellent interview, though what about NAT related P2P issues? Most people don't have inbound ports opened, so how do you get around that?

Re: Microsoft Research TechFest - Using P2P to speed up multiplayer gaming (and other things)

Rory — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 05:47:28 GMT

Argh.

It was working before I left Redmond (in Portland now).

Argh, argh, argh...

Is it working for anyone?

HEY - EVNET GUYS - MAKE TEH INTARWEBS WORK!!!!1111!!

Re: Microsoft Research TechFest - Using P2P to speed up multiplayer gaming (and other things)

RidiculousX — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 04:09:30 GMT

This makes me very excited.

Wish I could see it.

Re: Microsoft Research TechFest - Using P2P to speed up multiplayer gaming (and other things)

raymond — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 02:48:45 GMT

A first for Channel 9: excellent sound, no picture.

Rory, did you forget to take the lens cap off?

It happens to everybody.

About a month ago, I made this mistake for about 30 seconds.

LOL

[H]

Re: Microsoft Research TechFest - Using P2P to speed up multiplayer gaming (and other things)

RevFry — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 18:10:01 GMT

I hope you get this sorted out.. I'm interested in seeing this.