Quiver: a middleware for distributed gaming

Massively multiplayer online games have become popular in the recent years. Scaling with the number of users is challenging due to the low latency requirements of these games. Peer-to-peer techniques naturally address the scalability issues at the expense of additional
complexity to maintain consistency among players. We design and implement Quiver, a middleware that allows an existing game to be played in peer-to-peer mode with minimal changes to the engine. Quiver focuses on achieving scalability by distributing the game state. It achieves consistency by keeping the state synchronized among all the players. We have built a working prototype of Quake II using Quiver. We analyze the changes necessary
to Quake II and discuss how generic a software like Quiver can be.