Multiplayer Roundtable Day 1: Synchronizing Game State
Date & Time: Wednesday, 3/1 at 11:00am | Location: Room 123, North Hall | ND Speaker(s): Edward Pereira, Programmer and Drew Thaler, Programmer | Schedule Link
Summary: One of the first tasks for any multiplayer game is connecting players together and getting them to agree on game state. The way this is handled can be impacted by all sorts of things: the game's genre, the target audience, and the expected variety of internet connections involved. Using the group's interests as a guide, this roundtable will explore different methods to keep the state consistent and talk about solutions to problems that arise when dealing with the vast and complicated internet. Topics can include but are not limited to peer-to-peer networking, latency reduction, and bandwidth management.
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Multiplayer Roundtable Day 2: Server Architecture
Date & Time: Thursday, 3/2 at 10:00am | Location: Room 123, North Hall | ND Speaker(s): Edward Pereira, Programmer and Drew Thaler, Programmer | Schedule Link
Summary: More and more multiplayer games these days have become full-fledged services that players invest their time and money in. As such, programmers need to build the back-end systems that manage all of this data, foster social connections, and even track financial transactions. In this roundtable, attendees will talk about server technologies to fill these requirements like matchmaking, friends lists, player profile storage, virtual currency, cloud computing, and any other topics the group is interested in.
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Multiplayer Roundtable Day 3: The Ecosystem
Date & Time: Friday, 3/3 at 10:00am | Location: Room 122, North Hall | ND Speaker(s): Edward Pereira, Programmer and Drew Thaler, Programmer | Schedule Link
Summary: Beyond the gritty details of synchronization and servers, there's a lot more to multiplayer games. Tournaments, streaming, community building and management, promotions, telemetry, and a host of other topics. This session will be a higher level discussion about all these things and your dreams for the future of multiplayer technology.