Week 9 Summaries
The Effect of Latency and Network Limitations on MMORPGs (A Field Study of Everquest 2)
MMORPGs have been picking up a lot of traction over the past decade thanks to the increase in bandwidth and other technology advances. They require the ability to support a huge world and an extremely large number of players at the same time. The architecture is a multi-server architecture with a mix of processing on client and server side. These introduces a new set of problems in itself. One of the primary problems that affects the experience is latency. The authors focused on assessing these latency issues. They initially explained the general architectures used and then performed various tests.
Two different design principles may be followed to structure: first, a Zone-based structure that separates the world into different zones and loads up the one where the player currently is. This is a good approach to reduce redundant and needless processing but requires extra loading times when the zones change. The second way is to implement a boundary-less environment structure in which the whole thing is loaded up. But then this is a highly complex implementation as well as involves unnecessary processing. Everquest 2 implements the zone based approach.
They first define a good player, then describe their test environment. They put these 2 expert” players in 2 different subnets thus being able to control their network statuses. The tests involved 2 players each trying to kill the same monster as fast as possible, a group combat situation and finally 1 player standing still while the other person run towards them.
The results show that Everquest 2 more or less handles lag well. For the first movement and combat task they were expecting the experience to break at 500ms latency but it was actually broken at 1250ms. For the group combat task they expected the same and again found that the experience broke at around 1000ms latency. For the final movement and environment test, they found that the person with the high latency lagged. One complaint of this study I would say is that they did not assess the system with high number of users.
DART: A Toolkit for Rapid Design Exploration of Augmented Reality Experience
DART or Designer Augmented Reality Toolkit is a system designed to allow designers to bring their ideas to fruition easily and quickly. The current systems that are out there require a lot of technical knowledge like 3D geometry, modelling and sensor handling even for trivial tasks. DART is intended to overcome this problem and allow designers to at least prototype. Designers find the medium to work with difficult and lack of integration with commercial tools they are familiar with as another something that prohibited them.
Macromedia Director was enhanced to support some visual marker tracking and overhead tracking etc. Designers can drag and drop media elements such 3D models and links to tracker can be placed in the physical world. It enables fast creation of content. AR Actors enable fast exploration of data. Using these actors, DART represent objects in the scene, interacting characters in the scene, and augmenting video in the scene. It also provides AR based event interactions using cues and actions.
Alice: Lessons Learned from Building a 3D System for Novices
Alice is a 3D graphics programming environment targeted towards undergraduates with no knowledge of 3D graphics and programming. It was targeted towards making graphics development to a much broader audience without having to learn the complicated math and cryptics in the background.
This will overcome the biggest hurdle faced by graphics users, programmers and designers alike. Thus it was designed very differently to the commercial products available. It was designed so that it avoided cryptic math and supported an easy to learn and implement philosophy.
The fact that most “home” PCs now a days support 3D acceleration, helped. The users had to add objects to the scene and then interactively create scripts for these objects. All the objects were arranged in a kind of tree structure. The scripts were in python but with a lot of overloaded functions thus making it easier to use. The terminology is also kept simple and easy to understand keeping the audience in mind. Even the coordinate system was introduced in an easier to understand term. Thus overcoming the need to understand and compute 3D geometry.
The user studies were quite extensive too. The conducted a study on a hundred or so people with no or limited programming experience after putting them through a tutorial. They found that their performance was highly influenced by the terms and names that were being used. For example, up/down was easier to understand than the coordinate system.
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