Infrastructure

Infrastructure is the underlying software and hardware necessary for the development of the future of interactive games. Infrastructure includes work on:

 

• Massively multiplayer online game architectures,

• Large-Scale Simulation Networks,

• Instant games,

• Game engines and tools,

• Security, • Next generation consoles, and

• Wireless & mobile devices.

 

Architectures for massively multiplayer online games (MMOG) are important for many application domains, including the military, homeland defense, and online education. The fundamental research question is how do we develop software architectures that are dynamically extensible and semantically interoperable, i.e. how do we build game or simulation clients that can connect into a running MMOG, download the appropriate code for display and interaction, and then operate with the other online players? This is a fundamental research question of interest to the gaming world and the large governmental game-based simulation world. There are currently no dynamic solutions

 

Game engines and tools are an important research area if we are going to attack the lack-ofreuse problem in gaming and if we are to move games from crafted systems built by game industry gnomes to engineered systems used widely in the government and corporate worlds. Currently the only part of the game world that uses reusable game engines is that of 5 first-person shooters (FPSs). Some attempts to broaden that usage to other domains have occurred in the very successful America.s Army project but all such uses have suffered from major limitations. Those limitations include the lack of support for large terrain boxes . most game engines can do 1km x 1km and most real-world application require much larger spaces; onerous and expensive game engine licenses; and general unavailability of game engines to the R&D and serious games community at large. There is a need for an open source game engine, including development toolset that is as widely available and utilized as Linux. With an open source game engine, we can explore additional capabilities not provided now, including the larger terrain box, dynamic terrain, physical modeling, and other requirements ignored by the entertainment world. In addition, with an open source engine, many of the other directions the virtual reality community and gaming communities have not been able to well explore become more possible with this open source testbed, including the modeling and simulating of computer characters, story and human emotion.

 

Streaming media is an important part of the future of interactive gaming for the streaming of dynamic content to PC-based games as well as to mobile devices. Mobile devices are an important part of our serious games future as computing becomes smaller, faster, and more capable. We need to research what are the proper interfaces for such device, and how can they best be appropriately deployed for serious purpose.