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I
became fascinated with multi-player gaming in university (or, as my wife
likes to call that era, the 1980’s). . . [MORE]
 Larry Mellon,
Darius Kazemi, Marty Poulin, Brian Hafer:
Panel Presentation
ION Game Conference, 2008.
Larry Mellon,
Bill Dalton, Gordon Walton, Darrin West:
"Large-scale Engineering for Online and Offline Games"
Tutorial
Game
Developers Conference (GDC), 2007.
Game
Developers Conference (GDC), 2005.
This
paper is an analysis of similarities in the problem space between DoD’s
large-scale training simulations and large-scale online persistent worlds. I
was hoping to transition much of our DARPA work in Advanced Distributed
Simulation directly to the gaming world. But while the problem spaces were
very similar, it was apparent that the DoD software was not very suitable for
online gaming.
From
the proceedings of the Game Developers Conference (GDC), Spring 1999.
This
paper is the architecture I put together for Orcus, a California Internet gaming company that
Darrin West – another alum from the Jade / DARPA work – and I had
joined. Orcus ran out of money in the great .com die-off of 2001, but
fortunately, Electronic Arts had a big online game under construction, and
they needed expertise in distributed time management and refactoring legacy
simulations for parallel execution. Oddly enough, Darrin and I happen to know
more about those obscure topics than the average bear, so we both joined up
with EA.
The
next three talks are essentially post-mortems of work Darrin and I did when
we joined the development team for EA's "The Sims Online": their
flagship project for online gaming. A lot of the game's infrastructure and
development processes were not set up to deal well with scale: the talks look
at what needed to change, and how we changed it.
These
last two talks are more hypothetical in nature. I've always been puzzled why
the development of effective tools is so often left to the end of a project,
versus being done at the beginning. My first cut at the problem is in the Austin "Business
Case for Automated Testing" slides. The final talk is a half-day
tutorial I put together for PADS at one of the ACM multi-conferences. Some of
the researchers had seen that gaming was generating a number of interesting
research problems, so they asked for an overview of problems in game
development and potential research focal points. Better still, the work would
be in a hot new field that would help attract the smart kids to their
programs ;-)
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Distributed Parallel Simulation
I got involved in distributed systems
work back in the early '80's with Project Jade at the University of Calgary.
I ended up building network engines and tools for them, they funded my
University bum lifestyle and let me work around my class schedule: a fair
trade. . . [MORE]
Large Scale Distributed Simulation
- Larry Mellon:
" Use of Cluster Computing in Simulation."
17 KB HTML
document
- Larry Mellon: "Overview of Cluster Computing as Applied to Large
Scale Simulation." Simulation Interoperability Workshop
(SIW) newsletter.
471 KB Rich Text
Format document
- Jim Cantor, A. Evans, Larry Mellon: " ASTT Cluster Computing in Support of Large Scale
Distributed Simulation: Final Report." Fall 1999.
3.87 MB Word
document
- Larry Mellon: "Data
Distribution Management Experimentation Plan." Internal
Report, January 1999.
Drawn from the RTI 2.0 design work and explored under ASTT, this
document defines a tag-based interest management scheme, a GAK component
to exploit the tag information to reduce network traffic (using
multicast and othe techniques). Metrics and basic classes of GAK
algorithms are also defined.
288 KB Word
document
- Larry Mellon, Darrin West: " Test Methodology for Large Scale Distributed
Systems." 1998.
57 KB Powerpoint
presentation
- David Itkin, Larry Mellon: " Cluster Computing in Large Scale Simulation."
From the proceedings of the Simulation Interoperability Workshop (SIW),
Fall 1998.
109 KB Word
document
- S. Bachinsky, R. Fujimoto, Larry Mellon, Glenn
Tarbox: "RTI 2.0 Architecture." From the
proceedings of the Simulation Interoperability Workshop (SIW), Spring
1998.
91 KB Word
document
- John G. Cleary, Darrin West: "Wide
Virtual Time With Application to Parallel Discrete Event Simulation and
the HLA RTI." From the proceedings of the Summer
Computer Simulation Conference, Reno,
Nevada, July, 1998.
455 KB Word
document
- David Itkin, Henry Ng, Jim Ramsey, Darrin
West: " Event Distribution And State Sharing In The Thema
Parallel Discrete Event Simulation Modeling Framework."
From the proceedings of the Object Oriented Simulation Conference
(OOS'98), San Diego,
January 1998
This paper records the design philosophy and high level functionality
of the Thema product. It is a good starting point to understanding what
Thema is, how one would use it, and what advantages it offers a modeler.
134 KB Word
document
- Larry Mellon: "Intelligent Addressing and Routing of Data via the
RTI filter Constructs." Simulation Interoperability
Workshop (SIW), Fall 1997
System design factors affecting scalability in general, and the
specific impact of the filter API for the RTI.
152 KB Word
document
- Ed Powell: "The Use Of Multicast and Interest Management in DIS
and HLA Applications." From the proceedings of the 15th
Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) Workshop, Fall 1996.
85 KB Word
document
- Larry Mellon, Ed Powell, Glenn Tarbox, J.
Watson: " Joint Precision Strike Demonstration (JPSD)
Simulation Architecture." From the proceedings of the
14th Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) Workshop, Spring 1996.
134 KB Word
document
- Jesse Aronson: "The STOW97 System
Architecture and Implementation Design." From the proceedings of
the 14th Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) Workshop, Spring 1996.
- Larry Mellon: "Hierarchical Filtering in the STOW System. " From
the proceedings of the 14th Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS)
Workshop, IST-CR-96-02, Spring 1996.
Discusses two levels of interest management: one network-friendly,
one modeler-friendly, and how to translate between the two.
62 KB Word
document
- Larry Mellon, Darrin West: "Architectural Optimizations to ADS."
From the proceedings of the Winter Simulation Conference, 1995.
The first paper on scalable architectures and techniques from the
industry, we introduce the terms "interest management" and
"predictive contracts" -- both extensions of industry
practices -- and their relationship to distributed cache coherency for
maintaining shared simulation state.
108 KB Word
document
- J. Calvin, D. Fusco, M. Newton, D. Van Hook:
"An Approach to DIS Scalability." From the proceedings of the
11th Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) Workshop, Fall 1994.
Includes reference to sectorization.
- Larry Mellon: "Sectorization: Increasing
the Parallel Performance of Simulations Containing Mobile, Sensing Entities."
Technical Report, SAIC, 1994.
- John Cleary, Jim Hofmann, Larry Mellon, Jim
Ramsey, Darrin West: "Infrastructure for rapid execution of
strike-planning systems." From the proceedings of the
1995 Winter Simulation Conference.
89 KB Word
document
Time Warp and Parallel Simulation
- R. Fujimoto,
L. Lome, Darrin West: "A
Parallel Discrete Event Simulation Standard for Modeling and Simulation."
Simulation Interoperability Workshop (SIW) Newsletter.
20 KB Rich Text
Format document
- Kiran Panesar, Darrin West: "Automatic
Incremental State Saving." From the proceedings of the Conference
on Parallel and Distributed Simulation, 1996.
- Darrin West: "Optimising
Time Warp." Master's Thesis, University of Calgary,
1988.
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