As my laptop decided to fail quite catastrophically the day after I handed in my honours project (just luck it didn’t do so before, really) I realise I haven’t updated the blog in some time. I’ll post results and likely also the written work and source code when I have my own laptop back again, but for now here are some images to show how the project ended. Continue reading »
Microcell Distribution
March 28th, 2010
The images in this post show the successful distribution of space over the network, allowing clients to connect and be assigned a section of the world to process. Currently the framework allows functions for distributing cells to be added when the simulation starts, as additional nodes connect, and/or at regular intervals. These can be managed either by the central server, or initiated by worker nodes themselves. The majority of the remainder of the project involves the algorithms for distributing cells between nodes.
Additionally, the framework now supports both hexagons and quads as cells. Hexagons have the advantage that only 3 cells meet at any corner, limiting the maximum number of nodes which might be involved should an event take place there. Here’s some images of the view from the server with the most basic (block) distribution of cells:
Microcell Testbed Images
March 20th, 2010
For once I have something visual relating to my honours project, so it seemed appropriate to share a sample here.
A major part of the project involves distributing microcells (fixed areas of the world) between a series of worker nodes both statically and dynamically. In order to test methods of achieving this, I created a small testbed application which simulates the task without networking. It is capable of using various methods to distribute cells, both at the start of the application and as it runs, both controlled by a central server and initiated by worker nodes and gives graphical and numerical feedback.
The images below were taken with a greatly reduced number of cells, and the work involved in processing each cell is artificial: there are no pathfinding characters yet. However hopefully it demonstrates to some extent how division of the world takes place, and allows me to easily test distribution methods before using them in the proper simulation.
Coloured by number of characters per cell.
Initial block distribution.
Random distribution for comparison.
Block distribution with dynamic passing after time.
As the actual application I am working on is written in C#, I used XNA to create the images here. As it is possible to render XNA frames to a windows form application with little difficulty, this is also the approach I will employ for visualising the complete project.