Virtually Zero Delay Interaction Between Online Game Players Using Kalman Filter-Based Dead Reckoning with Density and Distance Gain Control Adaptation

Abstract

Online 3D games require fast and efficient user interaction support over the network environments, and the networking support is usually implemented by the use of a network game engine. The network game engine should minimize the network delay and mitigate the network traffic congestion. To minimize the network traffic between game users, a client-based prediction (dead reckoning (DR) algorithm) is used. Each game entity uses the algorithm to estimate its own movement as well as the others'. In case the estimation error exceeds the threshold, the entity sends an UPDATE packet which includes velocity, position and the like to other entities. As the estimation accuracy is increased, each entity can minimize the transmission of the UPDATE packet. In this paper, a Kalman filter-based approach is proposed in order to improve the prediction accuracy and an adaptive Kalman gain control in order to minimize the number of UPDATE packets to distant devices. The BZFlag game was used in the experiment in order to verify the proposed approach and the results have shown that it is possible to increase prediction accuracy and reduce the network traffic by 12%.