Massively Online Games with Food Chains

Abstract

MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games) are today a multi-bilion dollar industry where typically thousands of players interact in a virtual world. Two of the main complaints of the MMOG community are the lack of interaction with the virtual universe, and the repetitive gameplay patterns. Introducing a virtual alimentary chain for the targets would allow for a much more exciting experience since the genetic evolution of the opponents would make each fight more unique, and collaboration among player community would be necessary to keep a sustainable balance in the virtual world. As these kind of games are designed for many thousands of players in real-time, a lot of compute power will be needed to simulate the genetic evolution. Parallel computing can greatly improve the performance, assuming the software is properly designed with parallelizations in mind. A couple of different schemes will be considered. Trying to fetch the ecology studies, a prototype architecture is presented here. A non-linear genotype-phenotype transformation mechanism (also called morphogenesis) has been designed with the purpose of obtaining Lotka-Volterra equations result. These research will lead to discussions and conclusion, hopefully guiding further development in this area.