Each player's movements and actions need to be tracked."īioWare has not announced the name or described the nature of its online game, but Dalton said it will be launched in 2009. "It will be embedded in the foundation of the game platform" and will "monitor and maintain the status of all players. Its StreamSQL can slice and dice message streams into timeframes or event-related sections for particular views and analysis.īioWare is using the StreamBase Processing Engine as its platform for tracking players' actions and movements. StreamBase's Stream Processing Engine is able to analyze in optimum cases up to 350,000 messages per second. BioWare doesn't want its players' loyalties to the game to be threatened by whimsical or unpredictable game sequences, Dalton noted. Those skilled at triggering Easter Eggs or unexpected game sequences can frustrate other players in an online setting. "Some players get to know the game intimately" and can use logic discrepancies, or in some cases, hidden "Easter eggs" - logic bombs planted by individual game developers as their signature in the game. An Easter egg might make a sound that was not consistent with the game's design, show a message, or cause a character to move out of the logic of his role, Dalton explained. One of StreamBase's functions is to analyze events and make sure no intruder is trying to disrupt the game's logic, make malicious movements against the activity of other players, or activate the hidden Easter eggs that are sometimes known to lurk in the game's logic. His firm needed a system that could analyze events on a massive scale as they occur in an online game environment and select the right adjustments for the environment. "With a multi-player online game, you don't know whether you're going to have 1,000 people playing or 50,000," says Bill Dalton, technical director of BioWare. For its new foray into multi-player, online gaming, it's looking to go beyond computer and console game approaches and capitalize on complex event processing from StreamBase Systems.
intelligence agencies, which have made a strategic investment in Lexington, Mass.-based StreamBase Systems through In-Q-Tel, the independent investment firm that supports technologies of interest to theīut StreamBase is used by Canadian gamemaker Bioware, the supplier of Apple Mac OS, PC computer, and Xbox console games such as Baldur's Gate based on Dungeons & Dragons and Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic. And that example may offer lessons on the real possibilities of complex event processing.Ĭomplex event processing has also caught the attention of U.S. Complex event processing is being adopted by a Bioware in hopes of increasing the complexity of logic in online games.