Software Engineering of Networked Digital Games

数字游戏已经成为一种越来越重要的娱乐形式。它们的吸引力包括它们引人入胜的交互性、它们通过网络游戏提供的社交机会，以及它们在网络、移动的电话、专用控制台和传统PC等平台上的广泛可用性。 游戏开发人员面临着无情的压力，要提供更好的图形，更逼真的物理，更自然的交互形式，并支持更大的网络组。因此，游戏的制作成本越来越高，需要越来越复杂的专业知识来制作。与此同时，游戏的价格也在下降（特别是在移动的和社交平台上）。游戏在教育、广告和理疗等专业市场也被证明是有价值的，这些市场不具备传统工作室所使用的大型团队和预算。 为了帮助解决这些问题，我们将研究新的技术，帮助网络游戏的软件工程。我们的目标是提高网络游戏的编程水平，提供高性能的支持，处理网络通信，持久性和一致性维护存在滞后的难题。这项工作将导致新的编程抽象，具体化的实验工具包。我们的新技术将应用于两个示范项目，一个是脑瘫儿童的运动视频游戏，另一个是军事模拟的编排。

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.