Thursday, March 24, 2011

Some rewrites, report, status

I'm working on some rewrites now, I am rewriting the ggs_player to be a gen_server because it is just much easier to handle and I am rewriting the ggs_protocol module because it didn't take in account that TCP is something like a stream and gen_tcp does not the work to seperate between different messages a client sends but only sends a callback when a tcp package arrives. Therefore sometimes only half of the data arrives and stuff like that. I had to add something like a accumulator to handle all of that.

Perhaps the more important thing is that we changed the direction of our thesis from "just" implementing a game server to researching about scalability and fault tolerance of game servers at a academic level. Currently we are reading many scientific reports and books about scalability and fault tolerance and try to be as scientific as possible when we write our report. You can actually take a look at it: https://github.com/jeena/GGS-report

We still want a working Generic Game Server but it won't be a real world product but more some type of a prototype of such one where we test our hypothesis on performance, fault tolerance and scalability if we need to get our hands dirty.

To be able to test such stuff we need to write some bots which will play games via our server. And we need to write code which collects data during the games.

To get the code more stable we are trying to replace our unit tests with quickCheck tests.

Hope the project is still interesting for you who have been following it until now :-)

Monday, March 7, 2011

Texts and presentations

It was a little bit quiet here on the blog for the last two weeks, but this doesn't mean that we had vacation or something. We have actually been writing a lot and I'd like just to load up the stuff here so you can read it if you want. This are links to PDF:s