One of the major limitations preventing genuinely massive simultaneous online gaming is the abysmal state of consumer-grade Internet bandwidth. Microsoft Research hopes to change that and make the dreams of many gamers come true with a new technology called Donnybrook.
Donnybrook seeks to enable massive simultaneous gaming through two techniques. Focus Sets devotes bandwidth to the things you’re paying attention to (while draining it away from the things you aren’t), and Guidable AI periodically replaces remote players that you aren’t paying attention to with local bots.
From Microsofts research paper:
..even in a large firefight, a player will tend to focus on his or her current target. This principle implies that the aggregate amount of attention in the game grows only linearly with the number of players, not quadratically. As a consequence, there is always sufficient capacity, within a constant factor, to maintain update rates proportional to player attention. Thus, an object’s update rate to a player should vary based on his or her attention on the object. Our focus set technique implements this differentiation in update rates.
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…it is more important to ensure that the change of a replica’s position obeys game physics than to minimize its error with respect to the [it's actual position]. Our guidable AI technique achieves this realism. Guidable AI makes replicas act in a realistic manner between updates, unlike traditional replicas which only perform dead-reckoning of position between updates.
Microsoft Research’s paper reports that they have already conducted some small tests that are stunningly promising. During the human tests they report that when given a choice between a low upload bandwidth server with or without Donnybrook technologies, 96% of test players chose the Donnybrook server.
All of Microsoft Research’s testing so far has been conducted with Quake III on PCs with no mention of implementation on consoles. If the technology works as well as it seems to this early in its development, it may well be the beginning of a new standard in online gaming architecture for both PCs and consoles.
Microsoft Research claims that this technology should scale infinitely with the upload bandwidth of players (see picture) and should be relatively easy for game developers to implement.
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