Cloud-assisted rendering support for mobile online gaming (Part A)

• Main Author: Pang, Jun Jie
• Other Authors: Tang Xueyan
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2014
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/58942
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Mobile online gaming has been gaining popularity in recent years. Mobile devices generally have very limited computing power. This project aims to reduce the computing requirements by offloading the workload to remote servers. This allows the traditional fat clients to be thinned down. This way, mobile devices will be able to play high end games, eliminating software and hardware compatibility issues. The author’s part in this project focuses on the development of the customized client and server Virtual Network Computing (VNC) system. Traditional VNC viewers use remote frame buffer (rfb), which made use of “rectangular updates”. The protocol divides the display into smaller rectangles. Instead of rendering the entire frame, only affected parts of the frames (i.e. the smaller rectangles) are updated. This generally works well, however when majority of the frame requires updating, the rendering of the rectangles will appear to lag and stutter. This will result in a very bad user experience for gamers. In order to remove the stutters and the “boxy” updates arising from the rfb protocol of the VNC systems, the author replaced the traditional rfb protocol with a live video feed. Through integrating live video feed, the entire frame updates together. This will effectively eliminate the “boxy” updates and stutters of the traditional VNC viewer. The user experience will be akin to watching a video. The outcome of the project was successful to a certain extent, able to play non time critical games. The video stream delivered on average is behind the real time application by almost 2 seconds. Most of the limitation stems from the transmission protocol and the various levels of buffering. Further work can be done to minimize the buffering, speed up the encoding, and change the implementation to dedicated protocols like RTSP.