摘要：

Current mainstream architectural approaches to Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) utilise Client/Server-Cluster topologies, where scalability and interaction is hampered by a reliance on hardware provisioning for scaling, whilst partitioning the game world into distinct regions is common. Recent academic research has focused upon the adoption of P2P-based solutions; whilst scalability is considered inherent in P2P architectures, the distribution of state in an efficient manner is non-trivial. The lack of prototypical implementation using real-world gaming technologies implies that existing research has failed to demonstrate the practical application of P2P-based MMOGs. This thesis addresses these issues through two themes: The first theme presented within this thesis details the implementation of a novel MMOG test-bed framework, which has been created to address the development, deployment, execution and analysis of MMOG architectures across heterogeneous machine configurations in order to facilitate the production of prototypical MMOG architectural implementations which can practically demonstrate the efficacies of the proposed architecture and provide a means of direct comparison and enable comparative appraisals against the enterprise-grade Client/Server architectures which have seen widespread utilisation within the games industry.

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