Gaming is expected to be one of the most significant growth areas in mobile
services over the next few years. However games and particularly multi-player
games present operators with a potentially burdensome infrastructure.
Terraplay, a Symbian Technology Partner, believe they have a solution to this
issue.
Gaming is set to become one of the major applications of mobile technology. One
estimate from Frost & Sullivan suggests the industry was worth US$436.4 million
in revenue last year and will reach US$9.34 billion by 2008. While other are less
optimistic, for example Ovum are predicting a global market worth US$4.4 billion
by 2006 and In-Stat/MDR suggest US$2.8 billion. One thing is clear it will be a
significant market and Network operators are embracing it as a major revenue
earner.
While single user games resident on a device will have a role the major focus will
be on multi-user games. There is perceived to be a significant appeal to the
public for games were they are playing against other people and not just a
computer. Multi-user games also have an obvious advantage to the operators of
providing an ongoing network utilization and consequential revenue stream.
However on-line multi-user games present the operators with a potentially large
infrastructure overhead if each game requires its own server, network
architecture and is delivered with its own unique management tools. It is
possible that without standardization vendors will be unable to realize the
potential of on-line gaming. Terraplay overcomes these issues by providing a
single core infrastructure to manage multi-user games in the network
environment.
Terraplay started life as the MUGA, Multi-User Real-Time Game Access Service,
under the guidance of Magnus Jändel at the Ericsson Compression Lab during
the late 1990’s. The original concept was prototyped in 1999 by interfacing an
existing racing game, STCC, with the system. Around this time Ericsson
approved a business plan to commercially implement MUGA and Terraplay was
born.
The Terraplay system sits within the carrier's infrastructure and provides the
transport between the games server and client devices. It consists of four main
components illustrated in the following schematic:
The Terraplay Games Access Server (GAS) intelligently routes and prioritizes
games data between players (peer to peer) or players and the games content
server (client-server). It is designed to ensure that the critical game data is
exchanged between players regardless of the network connection they have. This
data communications model is however particularly relevant to the wireless
environment where bandwidth is limited and can be subject to significant
temporary constraints, such as network congestion. This intelligent data
distribution model uses two mechanisms, DSM (Dynamic Subscription Model)
which prioritizes data on its relevance to each player and ARC (Adaptive Rate
Control) which varies the frequency of data updates depending on the games
needs. Take the example of a racing game where a player is following one car
closely while another player is half a lap ahead. Information on the car directly
ahead is critical and needed frequently for play, while little information is needed
on the car half a lap ahead. The GAS uses this information to transmit the most
important data on the car immediately ahead frequently and in detail, while
updating information on the other car infrequently and in less detail.
The GAS uses three data object types to transmit game information:
Stream Objects which are fast and efficiently multicasted data objects
delivered directly to the game clients
Basic Objects that are reasonably fast. They are distributed and stored on
each GAS in the system and made available to the client based on their
subscription profile
Messages, which can be fast but unreliable or slow and reliable, which are
delivered to specific clients. Messages can also be secured and because of this
are commonly used for activities such as initialization.
The Terraplay Management System provides all the management to the service
provider through five basic functions:
It records information for billing and usage statistics
Sets up game sessions and assigns authenticated users to appropriate
sessions. Authentication itself will usually have been undertaken through
interaction between the lobby and the operator’s user data base
Allows for the administration of the game service
Balances network load between GASes, and
Provides telecom-grade alarm functionality for service level issues.
The billing functionality supports various charging models for each game,
including pay-to-play, time-based, and subscription models.
The Terraplay Lobby Server Interface (LSI) is the interface between the lobby
server, which is the usual access point for players when they start playing a
game, and the Terraplay System. The LSI provides the basic information to allow
a user to connect to the game through a GAS and utilize Terraplay resources.
The Terraplay Common Network Interface (CNI) is the interface that a developer
utilizes in building a game client. It provides a set of commands (over 100 in
total) for exchanging information about the game with the GAS.
The CNI currently has implementations for Microsoft Windows, Symbian OS,
Pocket PC, Sony PlayStation®2 and Java. While at present the Symbian C++
SDK only supports v6, e.g. the Nokia 9200 series and 7650, Stefan Vlachos
Terraplay's Business Development Director suggested that Terraplay are very
likely to be supporting other Symbian based phones. He noted that “we do
believe that Symbian is a very important operating system in the mobile world
and we will be going forward with Symbian but detailed plans will depend on the
handset rollout”.
Interestingly Terraplay does not support Palm, which Stefan explained was due to
the fact that “we have not seen Palm taking off in the mobile space and certainly
we consider J2ME more appropriate to give us coverage.”
The CNI APIs release the developer from building a radio network interface for
their game. The CNI does not impose any standards on the games data itself.
This means that adaptation of an existing game to enable it to run using
Terraplay is a relatively straightforward exercise using the CNI API to wrap
existing data. Also when a game has been develop for one platform the standard
API's mean that the network interface portion of the code can be easily
transferred to another platform.
The Windows SDK is available from Terraplay’s Web site for download and
evaluation. For commercial use each platform SDK is available on a per title
basis, although there is currently no charge for the licenses. Stefan explained
that part of the reason for not distributing the SDKs freely on the Web is so that
Terraplay can "engage developers in joint projects to ensure the applications are a
commercial success".
There is however one issue which Terraplay can not address and that is latency
within wireless IP networks. Typically wireless latency is between 1 and 2
seconds and as a result Stefan noted that "you definitely won’t see Quake on a
mobile device in the near future". While action games may not be right for
current wireless environments there are still significant opportunities in strategy
and role playing games. Stefan also sees a burgeoning market for interactive
entertainment noting that "these applications can be relatively simple to develop
but have the potential to reach a really massive audience". Importantly Terraplay
sees mobile entertainment applications as more mainstream than hard-core
gaming which in their view just does not have the same mass market. These
types of applications would build on the momentum created by the current SMS
based voting linked to sports events, quiz shows and other competitions but allow
the feedback to be indistinguishable from real-time interaction. One of the
features of this type of system is the massive peaks in traffic over short time
periods, something that Terraplay is architected to handle.
Terraplay was first launched at the ECTS Expo in London in September 2000.
Since then implementations for technical evaluation have been made in UK,
Spain, France and Sweden.
The public roll out of Terraplay is expected to occur within the next six months
with network operators in Western Europe. There has also been interest from
Asia and the US but these markets are not Terraplay's focus in the short term.
Stefan is optimistic about the likely penetration as “Terraplay works at the
infrastructure level, we believe we are unique in that respect and will be creating
a new de-facto standard”.
If you want to know more about the Terraplay system their web site
(wwww.terraplay.com) provides extensive information with in depth and
comprehensive white papers covering all aspects of the architecture and games
development.
About the “WDN Symbian Guy" Richard Bloor:
Richard Bloor has 16 years experience in the IT industry. His earlier
work was largely in design and development of commercial and
manufacturing systems but more recently has focused on
development and test management of government systems.
Richard Bloor is the Mobile Applications champion at System
Architecture consultancy Equinox of Wellington, New Zealand.
