Game-on-demand:: An online game engine based on geometry streaming

In recent years, online gaming has become very popular. In contrast to stand-alone games, online games tend to be large-scale and typically support interactions among users. However, due to the high network latency of the Internet, smooth interactions among the users are often difficult. The huge and dynamic geometry data sets also make it difficult for some machines, such as handheld devices, to run those games. These constraints have stimulated some research interests on online gaming, which may be broadly categorized into two areas: technological support and user-perceived visual quality. Technological support concerns the performance issues while user-perceived visual quality concerns the presentation quality and accuracy of the game. In this article, we propose a game-on-demand engine that addresses both research areas. The engine distributes game content progressively to each client based on the player's location in the game scene. It comprises a two-level content management scheme and a prioritized content delivery scheme to help identify and deliver relevant game content at appropriate quality to each client dynamically. To improve the effectiveness of the prioritized content delivery scheme, it also includes a synchronization scheme to minimize the location discrepancy of avatars (game players). We demonstrate the performance of the proposed engine through numerous experiments.