Introduction
Thank you for taking the time to visit my personal website. Here you will find information about me, Edward Messina, and ways you can get in touch with me. Please make sure you also have a look at my current project Merspi on my website.
Extracts of Work
Improving Client-Side Gaming Experience
There are many techniques being deployed by game developers to help aid the player's experience in any type of game, especially online multiplayer. Player prediction, sometimes known as input prediction is concerned with predicting what the player will experience client-side before the server actually renders a new gamestate. Its main concern is to do with player actions and what the consequences of the players actions will cause their avatar to experience. The benefit of this is that it conceals the players from any latency they think their avatar is experiencing, although when the RTT increases it's more easily recognised if something is fixed.
This is all made possible on the client-side, the client no longer waits for a response from the server, and instead the gamestate is predicated locally and provides the user with instantaneous feedback(1). Another method is opponent prediction, which is also deployed on the client-side. In essence this basically makes an assumption that the last direction and speed your opponent (on the same server) hasn't changed yet until a new update is received. This gives players the ability to reduce their network traffic because less frequent updates are going back and forward between client and server and server and client due to the client side prediction.
The only updates sent by the client are when their actual path begins to differ by more than a predefined amount from their original path, for example:
T=0: A player is running in a straight line (initial update)
T=2: The player is still running in the same direction at the same speed (no update, a prediction)
T=3: The player moves around a rock (update, predicted path is changed)
(1):Wikipedia. Client-Side Prediction. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. [Online] Wikimedia Foundation, 19 12 2008. [Cited: 9 9 2009.] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client-side_prediction.
Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory User Probes
To see if a user actually joined the gameserver and played ET during this timeframe, we would expect to see several thousands of packets going backwards and forwards between the client to server and server to client. The method I used to find out how many users were probing was to create a filter in Wireshark to only show packets that had a UDP payload of "getinfo" such as: "udp contains "getinfo" which responded with 332 packets containing a probe to the server during this trace. The problematic part of this is that several IP addresses probed the packet once at the start of the trace, again during the trace and even again later in the trace. The number of unique remote IP's that are present are ~284.
Implementing Information Security
To implement Information Security to secure a postive security posture, a priority based implementation of information security is a very proactive approach. A structure that has been broken down into phases that are more manageable, will allow an organisation to choose the most appropriate approach based on their available resources and the organisations need.
Areas within each domain can be worked on concurrently and can be revisited as time progresses and the organisaitons level of information security maturity increases. This will allow for continuous improvement and as it will be implemented based on priority the critical areas will be addressed first. It is important to note that establishing an IT Security Program within an organisation is not a onetime event, but it should be an ongoing venture that follows a cyclical process.
The evolution of Ethernet in gaming
The evolution of Ethernet increasingly enlarged the multiplayer gaming industry, allowing users to compete in competitions at large LAN events, largely sponsored by gaming manufactures or online communities. Ethernet switched networks have been developed to allow a group of users to play in the same geographical location, running the same game and connecting to the same locally hosted server.
This effectively eliminates any sort of latency discrepancies for the gamer to complain about, and it's often heard in gaming communities to "Do it at LAN" meaning that they lucked out on a shot they pulled off online because of effects such as jitter and packet loss. Again, this is a big influence on the FPS genre, but also at the same time Warcraft 3, Starcraft and WoW also benefit immensely in a LAN environment.
Ajay Bam-Vayusa
The initial idea arose in the Autumn of 2000 as Ajay Bam and Walter Stock, a friend also studying a Masters of Business Administration (MBA), were meeting to talk about
mobile technology for the consumer. The pain they were attempting to address was the issue of multiple coffee loyalty cards from varying coffee houses, with the solution
consisting of a mobile coffee card that allowed the customer to track their loyalty cards from their mobile phone. I have indentified this opportunity was created and
influenced by certain market and industry conditions, the figure below is a brief P.E.S.T analysis concerning macro environmental factors for Vayusa to consider and the source of the opportunity:
