Analyzing Network Traffic of Online Fighting Games
Project by: Myan Panikkar
A PDF copy of the original proposal can be found here.
Most video games featuring multiplayer modes have moved from local multiplayer setups to online multiplayer setups. In a local setting the performance of the game was only reliant on the game itself but over the Internet multiplayer games face several network-reliant performance issues. Players in these multiplayer games, such as Starcraft or League of Legends, want connections that are both fast and stable. Since games in different genres have different constraints on the number of players and game duration, our focus will be limited to the genre of fighting action games. These games, such as Street Fighter or Marvel vs. Capcom, are played as 1v1 setups and can be conducted as peer-to-peer sessions. Games in this genre also require fast and stable setups, as games can be won off minor differences in input frames.
There have been efforts put in by the gaming community to introduce middleware that attempts to improve the reliability of fighting action games. Currently there are two such middleware platforms: GGPO and FightCade. There has also been research conducted and presented through the annual NetGames conference, but this conference has not presented any papers on fighting action games in particular. Papers have been presented on detecting and reducing lag as well as analyses of similar video game genres, but few exist for fighting action games.
This project aims to give a technical breakdown of how middleware such as GGPO and FightCade improves the network performance and/or reliability of fighting action games. Furthermore, this project also aims to compare the network performance of fighting action games that use middleware like GGPO with fighting action games that do not use middleware.
Methodology
Two games were used for conducting analyses: Skullgirls and Street Fighter V. For each game, a series of matches were played in a lobby with various opponents. Across games, the open-source tool Clumsy was used to hamper the connection quality as desired. This was done to see how the game would handle high latency and/or packet loss. Videos of sessions can be found in the summaries. A full listing of videos is available here.
