[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: XML for Online Games
It's all about shared illusions. Latency: in this context, timing issues of maintaining shared state among distributed systems that use stateless protocols. The classic case is maintaining a coherent image for all of the users when each platform has different performance properties both locally (eg, processor speed, polygon update support) and globally (network performance, UDP vs TCP). Consider the problem of a game or simulation in which a character or agent drops a glass. If the physical properties of time are invariant, all of the users should be able to see if the glass is caught or hits the floor. Given the time to react, one might see it differently as long as updates depend on the timing illusion (how long to hit the floor). It is possible to create inconsistent conditions. Inconsistencies that create false or superstitious assumptions can make for funny problems in a game. These same inconsistencies can kill if the simulation is a real time control. B2B systems use rollback for business objects that do not close correctly. Parallel processing in operating systems can do similar tricks. Fine, but in a simulation, it isn't too cool if the glass jumps back onto the table. That's an update oopsie. Stuff like this occupied a significant amount of the VRML 2.0 design discussions. If you go into 3D chat rooms, you can see funny behaviors as avatars move around. These inconsistencies are acceptable. For the next level of gaming, they are not. There are standards like Distributed Interactive Simulations (DIS) which take up the problems of designing messages for updating parts of a view to all participating users. Attention is paid to ensuring that simulation events are prioritized effectively. Simply being able to suspend and rehydrate isn't enough. Games are written with a lot of attention to getting rid of superfluous compute cycles. For example, a game played in an open space has significantly more problems than one forced into a world of cube space (walls, ceiling, etc) where occlusion can be used effectively (eb, a BSP tree) to eliminate objects from a current context. The author creates the world with these problems in mind. For example, Level of Detail (LOD) switch nodes can be used to enable lower levels of fidelity of representation to speed up the display. At the longest distance from an object, a bitmap can be used. At an intermediate distance, a low-res polygon representation is used. Up close, the full-monty is available. Different texturing techniques can also be used to reduce load time in RAM-impoverished environments, and pre-lighting a texture (using shading) can be used to reduce the compute-intensive problems of calculating lighting. Remember, regardless of the name, all displays are really 2D and framerate is the critical metric. Optimization for maintaining a high enough framerate to pull off the illusion of 3D animation is a problem shared both in the authoring and in the implementation of software and hardware. 3D is an illusion convenient for authoring and navigation, but framerates are 2D update problems. Toss a network into that and a need to preserve that illusion regardless of network or platform performance, and you have a challenge. This is why the 3DOnTheWeb projects are significantly more complicated than just saying, "We'll use XML for interoperability." Performance is the sine qua non for illusions. XML solves some problems but not the hard ones where we have to share illusions. Ask yourself if you get faster performance from a meta-API (the DOM) or a bound API (toss the XML and use the object property names directly). This issue has strained the X3D effort severely and lead to systems that will interoperate with X3D (eg, Sony Blendo) and those that will use the DOM (eg, Xj3D). X3D has been a very good test case for the feasibility of XML ubiquity and the DOM API. Len Bullard Intergraph Public Safety clbullar@i... http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti. Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h -----Original Message----- From: Sam Hunting [mailto:sam_hunting@y...] Sent: Tuesday, October 31, 2000 9:52 AM To: Bullard, Claude L (Len); Linda van den Brink; xml-dev@l... Subject: RE: XML for Online Games > BTW: using XML in games is not that novel. The > X3D effort has an XML encoding and can be applied > to games, there is a talkingHead application that > uses XML, and extending the persistence of games > via XML serialization is a straightforward application. > The latency issues are a much harder problem > than picking XML for message formats. Can you expand a little on these "latency issues", Len? Thanks....
|
PURCHASE STYLUS STUDIO ONLINE TODAY!Purchasing Stylus Studio from our online shop is Easy, Secure and Value Priced! Download The World's Best XML IDE!Accelerate XML development with our award-winning XML IDE - Download a free trial today! Subscribe in XML format
|