Improving local network performance for real-time multi-player games

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Noodlecake Studios Inc. has built several popular games for mobile platforms, and the Super Stickman Golf (SSG) series has been extraordinarily successful, with millions of downloads and numerous awards (e.g., "Appstore Best of 2013", and Google Editor's Choice award). SSG is a physics-based simulation where players attempt to hit a ball through a (sometimes fantastical) golf course. One of SSG's main game modes is "local multi-player mode", in which players connect to friends through a wireless network (Bluetooth or Wi-Fi) and race to see who can complete each hole the fastest. This mode is extremely popular - Noodlecake's logs show more than 19 million local games played. However, there are several limitations with the current local networking. The goal of this research is to improve network performance for race-style multiplayer games that are connected through a local wireless network. We will accomplish this goal through three activities: (A) determine the specific real-world performance of local wireless networking in the SSG game and identify situational constraints and opportunities for network improvement; (B) develop application-level networking (ALN) techniques that can address the three problems discussed above (high-speed consistency maintenance in a p2p topology, message latency in a central-server topology, and server-fault tolerance in a central-server topology); and (C) integrate the networking techniques into the game interface to ensure that gameplay is as real-time as possible but also resilient to network difficulties.