We have investigated the bottleneck in web-based MORPG system and proposed a load-distribution method using multiple web servers. This technique uses a dynamic data allocation method, called the moving home. This paper describes the evaluation of our method using 4, 8, 16 web servers. We evaluated it on both the single-server system and multi-server system. And we confirm that the effect of the moving home through the comparison between the multi-server system without the moving home and that with the moving home. Our experimental result shows that the upper bound of the number of avatars in the eight-server system with the moving home becomes 380 by contrast that in the single-server system is 200.

This letter proposes a prototyping tool for Web-based Multiuser Online Role-Playing Game (MORPG). The design goal is to make this tool simple and powerful. The tool is comprised of a GUI editor, a translator and a runtime environment. The GUI editor is used to edit state-transition diagrams, each of which defines the behavior of the fictional characters. The state-transition diagrams are translated into C program codes, which plays the role of a game engine in RPG system. The runtime environment includes PHP, JavaScript with Ajax and HTML. So the prototype system can be played on the usual Web browser, such as Firefox, Safari and IE. On a click or key press by a player, the Web browser sends it to the Web server to reflect its consequence on the screens which other players are looking at. Prospected users of this tool include programming novices and schoolchildren. The knowledge or skill of any specific programming languages is not required to create state-transition diagrams. Its structure is not only suitable for the definition of a character behavior but also intuitive to help novices understand. Therefore, the users can easily create Web-based MORPG system with the tool.

This paper describes a near-optimal allocation method for web-based multi-player online role-playing games (MORPGs), which must be able to cope with a large number of users and high frequency of user requests. Our previous work introduced a dynamic data reallocation method. It uses multiple web servers and divides the entire game world into small blocks. Each ownership of block is allocated to a web server. Additionally, the ownership is reallocated to the other web server according to the user's requests. Furthermore, this block allocation was formulated as a combinational optimization problem. And a simulation based experiment with an exact algorithm showed that our system could achieve 31% better than an ad-hoc approach. However, the exact algorithm takes too much time to solve a problem when the problem size is large. This paper proposes a meta-heuristic approach based on a tabu search to solve a problem quickly. A simulation result shows that our tabu search algorithm can generate solutions, whose average correctness is only 1% different from that of the exact algorithm. In addition, the average calculation time for 50 users on a system with five web servers is about 25.67 msec while the exact algorithm takes about 162 msec. An evaluation for a web-based MORPG system with our tabu search shows that it could achieve 420 users capacity while 320 for our previous system.

A compromising technique is proposed for deterring clients from cheating by robot players in skill-based real-time network games. This technique is to inject a fair random noise into the manual input for a real-time game modeled as a chaotic dynamical system. The fair random noise is determined by means of the bit commitment protocol so that neither host nor client can control the noise in their favor. A scenario possibly plotted by a robot player for its victory may be spoiled by slight noise injection because of the sensitivity of chaotic systems to the input. The noise injection brings a luck-based factor into a skill-based game. In this sense, the technique proposed in this paper is not a solution but a compromise for the inherent problem of robot players with the skill-based network games. An example implementation of pinball is presented.