Online game server architecture using shared rendering
AssigneeSquare Enix Holdings Co., Ltd.
InventorsAlex Tait, Tetsuji Iwasaki, Mitsuru Kamiyama
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Abstract
A server arrangement for controlling a video game viewable by game participants at a plurality of respective terminals. The server arrangement has a game engine to output graphical scenes collectively representing a virtual world with game characters, each graphical scene describing a portion of the virtual world. The server arrangement also has a shared-rendering engine for associating game participants with respective graphical scenes and for performing a shared-rendering operation on the graphical scenes to generate respective moving-image data streams, the shared-rendering operation being common for the game participants that are associated by the shared-rendering engine with the same graphical scene.
Claims44
A server arrangement for controlling a video game viewable by game participants at a plurality of respective terminals in communication with the server arrangement, the server arrangement comprising:
- (a) a game engine to generate source graphics data conveying a plurality of graphical scenes, the graphical scenes collectively representing a virtual world with game characters, each graphical scene describing at least a portion of the virtual world;
- (b) a shared-rendering engine for:
- (i) associating game participants with respective graphical scenes;
- (ii) performing a shared-rendering operation on a first graphical scene to generate a moving-image data stream, the shared-rendering operation being common for game participants that are associated by the shared-rendering engine with the first graphical scene;
- (c) an output for transmitting the moving-image data stream to the game terminals of the game participants associated with the first graphical scene.
A method for performing shared-rendering of graphical scenes in a video game viewable by game participants at a plurality of respective terminals, the method comprising:
- (a) generating with a game engine source graphics data representing graphical scenes collectively depicting a virtual world with game characters, each graphical scene describing at least a portion of the virtual world;
- (b) associating game participants with respective graphical scenes;
- (c) performing a shared-rendering operation for a first graphical scene to generate moving-image data stream, the shared-rendering operation being common for game participants that are associated by the shared-rendering engine with the first graphical scene;
- (d) transmitting the moving-image data stream to the game terminals of the game participants associated with the first graphical scene.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.