Engineering Issues in Multiplayer Game Development,
1342
Programming, Tutorial
Amy Phillips
Programmer, Criterion Games
Bill Dalton
Technical Director, Austin Studio, Sony Online Entertainment
Dave Weinstein
Security Development Engineer, Microsoft
Gordon Walton
VP, Executive Producer, Sony Online Entertainment
Larry Mellon
Vice President (Engineering), System Architect, Emergent Game Technologies
Neil Kirby
Member of Technical Staff, Bell Laboratories
As the size and scope of multiplayer games continue to grow, the engineering requirements of multiplayer development expand drastically. Moreover, the lifecycle demands for successful massively multiplayer games can involve more than a decade of sustained development after launch. This tutorial focuses on the software engineering challenges of producing multiplayer games, including single-player versus multiplayer code, testing and regressions, security in peer-to-peer and server-oriented games, designing for performance and reliability, and protecting the consumers in an increasingly dangerous online environment.
Takeaways include issues and techniques for building test suites and integrating them with the production environment over the life of a product, security issues, currently exploitable classes of vulnerabilities, and techniques for increasing the safety and security of code as part of the normal development cycle, and techniques for integrating reliability, performance and schedule predictability into the development cycle and live operations, including architectural and process implications for your team.
Experienced developers, especially project and technical leads, who are working on or planning next generation multiplayer and massively multiplayer titles. |
