Software Engineering of Networked Digital Games

数字游戏已经成为一种日益重要的娱乐形式。它们的吸引力包括其引人入胜的互动性，它们通过网络游戏提供的社交机会，以及它们在网络、移动电话、专用游戏机和传统PC等平台上的广泛可用性。 游戏开发商面临着无情的压力，他们需要提供更好的图形、更逼真的物理效果、更自然的交互形式，以及对更大的网络群体的支持。因此，制作游戏的成本越来越高，制作游戏需要更复杂的专业知识。与此同时，游戏的价格正在下降(尤其是在移动和社交平台上)。游戏在教育、广告和理疗等专业市场也被证明是有价值的，在这些市场，传统制片厂使用的大型团队和预算是不可用的。 为了帮助解决这些问题，我们将研究有助于网络游戏软件工程的新技术。我们的目标是提高网络游戏的编程水平，为处理存在滞后的网络通信、持久性和一致性维护等难题提供高性能支持。这项工作将产生新的编程抽象，并在实验工具包中具体化。我们的新技术将应用于两个示范项目，一个是脑瘫儿童运动视频游戏，另一个是军事模拟编排。

Digital games have become an increasingly important form of entertainment. Their appeal includes their engaging interactive nature, the social opportunities they afford through networked play, and their wide availability on platforms ranging over the web, mobile phones, specialized consoles, and traditional PCs. Game developers face relentless pressure to deliver better graphics, more realistic physics, more natural forms of interaction, and support for larger networked groups. Thus, games are becoming more expensive to produce and require ever more sophisticated expertise to create. At the same time, prices of game are dropping (particularly around mobile and social platforms.) Games are also proving valuable in specialized markets such as education, advertising and physical therapy, where the large teams and budgets used by traditional studios are not available. To help address these problems, we will research novel techniques aiding in the software engineering of networked games. Our goal is to raise the level of programming of networked games, providing highly-performant support for dealing with the hard problems of network communication, persistence, and consistency maintenance in presence of lag. This work will result in new programming abstractions, reified in experimental toolkits. Our new techniques will be applied to two demonstration projects, in exercise video games for children with Cerebral Palsy, and in orchestration of military simulations.