Tribler-G

Abstract

There are currently many systems that offer online board games, for instance, social networking sites, where board games enjoy enormous popularity, but also systems such as the Internet Chess Club, which has been around for over a decade. However, these systems are all centralized and typically have drawbacks for the user, such as subscription fees or advertisements. As an alternative, we have designed a decentralized protocol, called GameCast, that enables users to play turnbased multi-player board games over a peer-to-peer network. The GameCast protocol supports three processes, dissemination of peer and game information within the network, game agreement, which allows one peer to invite another by sending invites, and game-play, which enables peers to play a game over the network. Our current GameCast implementation, called Tribler-G, is built as an extension to the Tribler file-sharing application, and focuses on enabling users to play online chess through the Tribler-G GUI. To evaluate the performance of the GameCast protocol, we have created GameTest, a system capable of emulating a peer-to-peer network. Using GameTest, we have conducted a large-scale emulation of hundreds of peers on the DAS-4 distributed supercomputer. The results acquired during the emulation show that GameCast scales well and uses little bandwidth. Additionally, we have performed user tests, the results of which show that users are generally positive about Tribler-G in terms of usability.