Federation Grid

Federation Grid is a new project that Magnetar Games is undertaking with a consortium formed especially for this purpose. It is an innovative project that combines the FederationX technology with the Grid architecture.

Federation Grid takes FederationX approach one step further, by combining the ideas developed by the FederationX with the Grid computing paradigm to create a network, analogous to the power grid, where users can access the computing resources without bothering about the source or the location, create their applications and have them executed on the same network. The only requirement for the users would be to have the required domain-knowledge.

GameXML

GameXML is an initiative sponsored by the the Game XML Consortium (XGC), of which Magnetar Games Corporation is a founding member.

GameXML is a collection of XML specifications which describe and script computer simulation engines. Developed by the XGC, it is an on-going project to create a reusable, standards-based architecture that can be applied toward computer games and simulations.

P2P Chess

The SCE project has just published a major paper titled: Towards a Scalable Collaborative Environment (SCE) for Internet Distributed Applications: A P2P Chess Game System as an Example. The SCE team has been able to utilize the FederationX technology and, in collaboration with Magnetar's researchers, produce a new paradigm, that of Collaborative Scalable Environment. For more information, here the abstract:

This paper presents the ongoing development of a scalable collaborative environment (SCE) for multiplayer distributed Internet games. SCE is unique in that it extends and applies the DoD and IEEE standard on High-Level Architecture (HLA) to Internet games. Furthermore, it is an open, meta-programmed, platform-independent system which runs on multiple devices such as PCs, cell phones and PDAs, and it includes a game lobby subsystem as well as a game object and digital asset repository. Although SCE is generally applicable to realtime-strategy games of arbitrary complexity, our initial SCE prototype targets the domain of abstract board games (ABG), with a particular focus on the game of chess. At the heart of the SCE framework is the Metanode-ORganized Prototype Hierarchy (MORPH) specification, an extension of the HLA's Object Model Template. A domain specific language (DSL) for abstract board games (ABG) has been created using the MORPH specification. Written using the ABG language, some "product instances" for chess and other board games are developed and referenced. In addition to providing a scalable environment for playing Internet games, SCE also supports collaborative authoring of distributed games via high-level scripting DSL.

A working prototype of a peer-to-peer (P2P) chess system has been implemented and presented in this paper to demonstrate the viability and practicality of the SCE methodology. The potential impact of SCE can be enormous once its full capability can be demonstrated with more applications examples and performance and scalability evaluations.

You can download the full text of the paper here (1.45MB .doc).