Audio and video communication in multiplayer games through generic networking middleware

Abstract

On-line computer gaming is steadily becoming more popular. This is partly due to the increasing realism, visual and other, which recent games present to players. However, one technological aspect that is often still neglected by the current generation of games is the provision of in-game streaming functionality. This can be attributed for a large part to the considerable effort developers need to put into its implementation. Client bandwidth is a valuable resource which should not be squandered lightly, meaning an efficient and thus time-consuming implementation is required. In this paper, we present our networking middleware which facilitates the integration of real-time streaming facilities in multiplayer games. The networking middleware consists of a number of interconnected proxy servers that are both application and network aware. In addition, the proxies are extensible, meaning game developers can add specific functionality to them when necessary. One example of such an extension we implemented ourselves is a video transcoding plug-in that enables the proxy to transcode video streams to a lower quality on-the-fly. Through experimental results, we demonstrate how our middleware exploits its compound awareness and video transcoding functionality to automatically and intelligently route and possibly also adapt multimedia network streams, thereby relieving game developers of this burden.