doubling the number of players and keeping the number of simulated cycles fixed the num-
ber of sense-reason-act cycles to be performed doubles, this can explain the close-to-linear
scalability.
5
Conclusion and Future Work
We have presented the Zereal Mobile Agent-based Massively Multiplayer Online Game Sim-
ulation platform. The implementation has been shown to be close to lineary scalable in terms
of number of players simulated. Primary contribution is the platform itself and its scalable
implemention that can be used as a testbed for research on MMOGs, in addition to be a
MMOG simulation platform Zereal can with minor adaptions provide a generic scalable
agent-platform, based on MPI communication it is relatively simple to use on various par-
allel supercomputers or grid-based environments.
Possible future extensions include: items that can tell the players how they are supposed
to be used, player coalition support, guilds, quests, improved intelligence support (e.g. BDI,
automatic planning and emotion engine), simulation of natural language based interaction
between players and/or NPCs, simulation of e-commerce activities in a MMOG [5] and im-
proved graphical interface support using the VR-environment provided by Silicon Graphics'
RAVE.
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Scalable MMOG Player Simulation