A Distributed Architecture for Online Multiplayer Games

This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of Colyseus , a distributed architecture for interactive multiplayer games. Colyseus takes advantage of a game’s tolerance for weakly consistent state and predictable work load to meet the tight latency constraints of game-play and maintain scalable communication costs. The system uses single-copy consistency and weakly consistent replicatio n to support low-overhead read/write access to data at any node. Colyseus also provides a rich distributed query interface a nd effective pre-fetching subsystem to help locate and replicate objects before they are accessed at a node. We have implemented Colyseus and modified a popular first person shooter game called Quake II to use Colyseus. Our measurements of Quake-II and our own Colyseus-based game with hundreds of players shows that Colyseus is effective at distributing game traffic and computation across the participating nodes. Our results show that Colyseus can suppor t low-latency game-play for orders of magnitude more players than existing single server designs, while requiring simil ar per-node bandwidth.