2004 Web and Downloadable Games White Paper 

IGDA Online Games SIG 

Among the disadvantages of the peer to peer architecture, is its inadequacy to provide control to the 

game administrators. All nodes being equal, none of them has a control on the entire simulation, 

providing greater opportunities for hacking and cheating. 

c) 

Standalone  

A stand alone game is a game that once installed is capable of operating without reliance on external 

networks or machines. As they do not rely on connectivity, stand alone games are often single player 

games or require multiple players to use the same computer simultaneously. Traditionally, stand 

alone online games are written in all software programming environments, including C/C++, Java, 

Flash, Shockwave, Visual Basic, and others. C# is also becoming a small player in the market. 

3. 

Network Protocols 

A connection or network protocol describes the set of rules that two applications use to communicate with 

each other. There are thousands of different network protocols in use, incorporating a wide set of uses, 

ranging from downloading documents to exchanging real time audio and video. Furthermore, when two 

applications communicate with each other, they will most likely use several protocols simultaneously. This 

section discusses the common protocols broadly used in networked online games.  

As described previously, stand alone games do not require any network protocol while played, and 

generally use Internet standards such as HTTP or FTP in order to be downloaded. Rather, network 

protocols apply to client server or peer to peer architectures, and to single session and persistent state 

worlds. 

a) 

Internet Protocols 

(1) 

IP 

Most computers on the internet today use the Internet Protocol (IP) to communicate with each 

other. IP is a low level protocol used by routers and hosts to ensure the packets travel from the 

source host to the destination host

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. IP hides the transmission path and the recipient host has no 

way to know what hardware is on the transmission path, such as phone lines, LAN, satellite links, 

etc. IP splits the packets into small fragments when they traverse network links that cannot 

support large packets, and reassembles the packets at the other end. Finally, the IP header also 

includes a  Time To Live  (TTL) field that specifies how many network hops may transfer the 

packet before the packet is discarded. This prevents packets from being accidentally routed in 

infinite loops around the Internet. 

Applications generally never use IP directly. Instead, they use one of the protocols that are written 

on top of IP. These higher layer protocols include services for acknowledgements and 

retransmission, or support for application port numbers. 

(2) 

TCP/IP 

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is the most used protocol on the Internet today. It is 

usually layered on top of the IP and referred to as TCP/IP. This protocol provides the running 

application with the illusion of a simple point to point connection to another application running on 

34

 S. Singhal, M. Zyda. 

Networked Virtual Environments   Design and Implementation.

 Addison Wesley, 

1999 

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