Networking Middleware and Online-Deployment Mechanisms for Java-Based Games

Currently, web-based online gaming applications are predominately utilising Adobe Flash or Java Applets as their core technologies. These games are often casual, two-dimensional games and do not utilise the specialist graphics hardware which has proliferated across modern PCs and Consoles. Multi-user online game play in these titles is often either non-existent or extremely limited. Computer games applications which grace the current generation of consoles and personal computers are designed to utilise the increasingly impressive hardware power at their disposal. However, these are commonly distributed using a physical medium or deployed through custom, proprietary networking mechanisms and rely upon platform-specific networking APIs to facilitate multi-user online game play. In order to unify the concepts of these disparate styles of gaming, this paper presents two interconnected systems which are implemented using Java Web Start and JXTA P2P technologies, providing a platform-independent framework capable of deploying hardware accelerated cross-platform, cross-browser online-enabled Java games, as part of the Homura Project.