Microsoft Research is cooking a new gaming system designed to support large-scale, high-speed, peer-to-peer interaction among participants, according to the company. Dubbed Donnybrook, the new technology is designed to break down the barriers associated with the volume of players capable of interacting simultaneously in the absence of provisioned dedicated servers. The product of a collaboration between Microsoft Research and the Carnegie Mellon University, the system was at the basis of simulation results involving battles of approximately 900 players interacting simultaneously. Via Donnybrook the bandwidth limits available to the machines participating in a gaming environment are no longer completely flooded by state updates, introducing the possibility of massive scalability to peer-to-peer gaming networks.

"This is a recent trend with multiplayer online games," stated Srinivasan Seshan, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. "One weakness with previous systems is that you can't support large open spaces or large battlefields where there are a lot of people directly interacting with each other. [Donnybrook], which has been borne out of the collaboration with Microsoft, [addresses] a particular aspect of the game where you really want a large interacting body of people. Given today's communication bandwidth available to the typical home user as well as the update for these particular games, we believe we can get to a typical, realistically sized battle."

The central aspect of Donnybrook is what the Redmond company referred to as the player's interest set. In this context, instead of gaming participants having to keep up to date with large densities of players, the focus is restricted to just a few, close items. In this manner, multiplayer online games will be able to permit extensive interaction by using limited resources.

"First, it reduces bandwidth demand by estimating what players are paying attention to, thereby enabling it to reduce the frequency of sending less important state updates. Second, it overcomes resource and interest heterogeneity by disseminating updates via a multicast system designed for the special requirements of games: that they have multiple sources, are latency-sensitive, and have frequent group membership changes," reveals an excerpt from the "Donnybrook: Enabling Large-Scale, High-Speed, Peer-to-Peer Games" whitepaper.