What should i research for my Honors

Question

I am looking in to doing my Honors in Games Technology and i was wondering in this degree that covers such a broad spectrum, what would be a good topic to research. Preferably something that hasn't been done to death, but involving maybe procedural methods and something that isn't based on computer graphics (because that has been done to death aswell).

Any suggestions, i still got 6 months to decide, so no rush.

Answer 1

Why not look into Artificial Intelligence?

AI is a make-or-break point for most games. No one wants the enemies to act completely abnormally, such as walking away when you shoot them.

Answer 2

Just string a bunch of technical words together and think "what would that mean?", for example

1. Autonomic Reconfiguration in Real-time Massively Multiplayer Online Games
2. Reactive Embedded Multimedia in Virtual Environments
3. Social Metrics as a contributor to AI algorithms in self-modifying environments

And on and on ...

Answer 3

One of the problems most online games (Pokers, MMORPGs, etc) have is cheating. Some ways of cheating are easier to detect than others (like alteration of the player's coordinates, etc) however, other like Bots or macros that harvest and increase the players skills etc are harder to detect specially for humans.

You could make some sort of AI cheat detection system (platform) that could spot these behaviors and flag them as suspicious for a human to review, like casinos do.

Emphasis on:

• Integration to existing different game styles/platforms (FPS, Car Games, Turns Based, MMORPGs, etc).
• Extensibility.
• Performance (False positives, bottlenecks, responsiveness, etc)

I'm thinking of dynamic/static data analysis through expert systems of some sort.

Another interesting approach would be to device a server architecture for realtime games featuring:

• Decentralized distribution of servers (p2p)
• Load balancing.
• Non partitioned virtual world. By this i mean, if Alice is playing in server A and Bob is playing in server B Alice and Bob can see each other and interact without the need of changing servers) A derivative of this topic would be the synchronization of the virtual world state (Alice on server A affects the virtual world in some way ie. builds a house, kills the main character on some unique quest, etc, then Bob playing on server B can see the house, or is no longer able to take the quest or the quest is canceled if already accepted)

I hope this helps, ill see if i can come up with anything else.

Answer 4

Perhaps an online gaming platform that would allow players to log in and play from computers and mobile devices as well. You could also look into a reputation propagation system for players in a decentralised Peer-To-Peer gaming environment, perhaps even porting the bit-torrent protocol to gaming, so the necessity of an expensive cluster of servers would be eliminated, while still allowing for massive multiplayer capabilities and statistics.

Answer 5

I've decided to go for using some cool techniques to try increase the learning curve of tasks in simulations.

Can't go into specifics though because you know...i don't want people stealing my idea :)