EUGLUG, the Eugene Linux Users' Group, is proud to announce the last
two presentations of 2003.
What: The Zynot Project
Who: Zach Welch, Zynot Project Leader
When: Saturday, November 22, 1:00
Where: EFN, 43 W. Broadway, Eugene
Zach Welch will present a set of ideas relating to his work on
producing a fork of the Gentoo Linux (www.gentoo.org) distribution for
The Zynot Foundation (www.zynot.org), starting by introducing a number
of the fundamental problems that must be overcome to succeed in
developing divergent open source projects. The solutions proposed lead
to a proverbial "forking toolkit", with which anyone can fork anything.
While verging on herecy, this toolkit would not offer a simple
unidirectional means for effectively forking projects. Necessarily, it
would include the means for both redistributing locally made changes as
well as integrating further changes available from the myriad of other
"like-forks". This is not far from open software development today.
In addition, an integrated Open-Lean software development toolkit
(www.openlean.org) will aim to provide the capacity for managing the
resulting distributed network of contributors toward producing both high
quality products and sustainable economic growth. In the end, the
toolkits should open the door for individuals or small teams to maintain
"micro-market forks" of their favorite distributions with little effort.
Zach is the Managing Member of Superlucidity Services, LLC., a
Corvallis-based company working to introduce sustainable software
development processes for open source and free software. If all goes
well, Superlucidity's next product will be a working version of the
forking toolkit and used to facilitate Zynot's fork of Gentoo Linux.
==============================================================================
What: Fully Distributed Peer to Peer Game Architecture
Who: Chris Gauthier-Dickey
When: Saturday, December 13, 1:00
Where: EFN, 43 W. Broadway, Eugene
For years, the game industry has used a client/server architecture for
delivering massively-multiplayer online games to players. This
architecture has the advantage that a single authority orders events,
resolves conflicts in the simulation, acts as a central repository for
data, and is easy to secure. On the other hand, it has several
disadvantages. First, it introduces delay between players because
messages are always forwarded through the server. Second, localized
congestion around the server increases with the number of players. Last,
the game's complexity is limited by the computational power of the
server. One local game company stated that their total bandwidth
requirements were equivalent to the entire City of Eugene's telephone
bandwidth just to deploy their MMOG. While we can throw technology at
most of these problems in the form of more servers and higher bandwidth
lines, this solution incurs significant costs.
To address these problems, we are developing a fully distributed,
peer-to-peer architecture for MMOGs.
With a fully distributed architecture, messages can be sent directly to
other players, thereby reducing delay and local congestion. Players can
start their own MMOGs without the massive investment in resources
required by the client/server architecture. Furthermore, every machine
connected to the game can contribute cycles to the overall simulation,
overcoming the bottleneck of computation that servers and clusters have.
However, the fundamental problem with a distributed game is trust. How
can we trust players to accurately represent when a given event has
occurred? Accordingly, the first component we have designed for this
architecture is the New-Event Ordering (NEO) protocol, which orders
events while ensuring trust. We have designed NEO to be cheat-proof at
the network level, allowing us to build peer-to-peer networks that are
trustworthy but still retain the latency requirements of real-time,
interactive games. NEO represents a major step forward in distributed
communication protocols for games and we will be using it to design the
rest of the communication architecture so that we may finally realize
fully distributed MMOGs.
==============================================================================
Check out these presentations and other EUGLUG activities
at our web site. http://www.euglug.org/
--
Bob Miller K<bob>
kbobsoft software consulting
http://kbobsoft.com [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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