Chat service for Cloud Gaming

Abstract

In any interactive gaming platform especially for team-based games, it is of paramount importance that a form of communication is available for players to converse with the rest of their team. However, the existing Cloud Gaming platform created by MAGIC does not have any chat feature and, therefore, there is a need to create one. Several pre-existing chat frameworks were investigated and the advantages of each framework is further analyzed to determine if it suited the requirements of this project. After said comparison, Web Socket was chosen as the core backbone of the chat application since it outweighs other HTTP model such as COMET in terms of efficiency and better performance. The framework was modified to suit the needs of this project and successfully developed and integrated into the existing Cloud Gaming platform and database. Since Cloud Gaming platform allows different users using varied hardware such as tablets, mobile phone or even personal computer to access the Cloud Gaming platform to play games, clients having different screen resolution can be expected. Boot Strap, a responsive user interface framework was implemented for the chat application’s interface to create a sleek and intuitive user experience. A variety of features were adopted and created. However, there remains room for improvement. Since the chat application was developed on a single local server, it was difficult to measure the optimal workload for the server in a production environment. Furthermore, how the performance of the server would degrade when the number of connected clients increases remain an unknown. It is to the author’s belief that any regression in performance could be mitigated through a distributed server framework.