Oludap, an AI approach to web gaming in the cloud.

• Cloud Computing Summit
• Conference
• Beginner

Oludap is a multiplayer online strategic game that is based on the open-source (j)Ruby on Rails framework MADMASS (MAssively Distributed Multi Agent System Simulator). MADMASS simplifies the development of next-generation web applications by relying on methodologies from Artificial Intelligence and Multi-Agent Systems. 

In Oludap, players compete in real-time for limited resources in a shared environment. Oludap’s gameplay is episodic, meaning that small groups of users can play one-shot games. This type of games presents two challenges: 

• the episodic nature of the game-play may yield to rapid and unpredictable fluctuations in the workload that can make planning for IT infrastructures not sustainable;
• the fact that players act on a shared environment generates a high level of contention on data thus, considering that consistency is a strong requirement, scalability may be at risk. 

In order to overcome these challenges, we are working to re-implement the data layer of the game on top of Hibernate OGM and Infinispan, in the framework of the Specific Targeted Research Project (STReP) Cloud-TM, which is co-financed by the European Commission through the contract no. 257784.