設計與實作一個超大型多人線上遊戲中介軟體

Abstract

MMOG (massive multiplayer online games)是一種可以讓數千人透過Internet同時在一個虛擬世界中互動的娛樂服務業，其中，中介軟體(middleware)技術則在下一世代的MMOG的開發中扮演了一個非常重要的角色，因為中介軟體不緊緊可以在服務方面提供更好的品質，對內容的開發者來說更可以使得程式的開發以及維護更為容易。在本篇論文所開發的中介軟體，是一個針對市場上的一些急迫性的需求：容易開發、佈署、維護、改更，提出方法並實作一個具有高效能的訊息導向網路引擎並兼具產生式編程(Generative Programming)特性的中介軟體，以期能夠讓內容開發及營運商享受到：更快能夠讓產品上市(in-time-to-market)、低成本(low cost)、高效能(high performance)以及高延展度(scalability)的好處。

A massive multiplayer online game (MMOG) lets thousands of players interact simultaneously within a virtual world via the Internet. However, it is much harder than people think to develop a MMOG. There are plenty of issues that MMOG developers may encounter, such as high performance network, distributed technology, load balancing, and so forth. In the meantime, time-to-market is also an important issue to develop a competitive MMOG. Middleware plays an important role in the development of next-generation MMOGs, which must be built on platforms that address not only the service aspect, but also code maintainability and development for programmers. This dissertation introduces the experience of designing and building a compact, high performance message-oriented middleware has a code-generation programming model that is designed to address many of practical problems. This middleware tries to overcome the common issues arisen in the MMOG environment and attempt to simplify the API in order to reduce the complexity of developing MMOGs. In addition, the MMOG middleware leaves developers the flexibility to adopt the solution and deploy it to any kind of MMOGs.