Hydra: A Massively-Multiplayer Peer-to-Peer Architecture for the Game Developer

The authors present the design and implementation of Hydra, a peer-to-peer architecture for massively-multiplayer online games. By supporting a novel augmented server-client programming model with a protocol that guarantees consistency in the messages committed when nodes fail, existing game developers can realize the benefits of a peer-to-peer architecture without the burden of handling the complexities associated with network churn. Their key contribution is the development of a programming interface that is intuitive and easy to use, and that can be supported transparently at the network layer. They have implemented a prototype of Hydra and they demonstrate that their proposed architecture is practical by developing two games under the Hydra framework: a simple "Capture the flag" tank game and a squad-based Real-Time Strategy (RTS) game.