Online Game Quality Assessment
Project Report
B.Sc. (Honours) Software Development
C00164522 – Luca Venturelli
MOS Plugin
B.Sc. (Honours) Software Development
Table of Contents
1.
Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 2
1.1
2.
Project Overview ............................................................................................................................ 2
2.1
3.
4.
5.
1
Purpose.................................................................................................................................... 2
About....................................................................................................................................... 2
Objectives........................................................................................................................................ 2
3.1
The goal of the application ..................................................................................................... 2
3.2
Outcome .................................................................................................................................. 2
3.3
Achievement and Learning ..................................................................................................... 2
Project Log ...................................................................................................................................... 3
4.1
Project Proposal (Original) ..................................................................................................... 3
4.2
Reasons behind Project ........................................................................................................... 3
4.3
Proposed Technology, Languages & IDE ............................................................................... 4
Task summary ................................................................................................................................. 4
5.1
Optional Tasks ......................................................................................................................... 4
5.2
Issues ....................................................................................................................................... 5
C00164522 – Luca Venturelli
MOS Plugin
B.Sc. (Honours) Software Development
1. Introduction
1.1 Purpose
The purpose of this document is to analyse the life cycle of the project, the problems
encountered, task summaries, outstanding risks and issues encountered.
2. Project Overview
2.1 About
The aim of the project is to develop a metric for online games and a plug-in called
MOS Plugin that helps the user to calculate the Mean Opinion Score (MOS). This metric
will estimate the effective user perception of the game quality by taking as parameter not
only the estimation of the network quality, but also the players experience and the I/O
parameters.
The aim of MOS Plugin is to monitor the quality of the network during a game and to
implement the metric developed.
The new metric proposed overcomes the existing metrics by adding an impairment
factor caused by the hardware quality and an advantage factor due to the user experience.
3. Objectives
3.1 The goal of the application
The goal of MOS Plugin, based on the supplementary specifications is to let the user
understand, based on an objective test, the quality of the game experience he can have
based on the quality of the network and on the hardware he is using.
3.2 Outcome
We believe the overall project was a success because we achieved a level of
correlation between the perceived quality and the metric results in excess of 95%.
3.3 Achievement and Learning
We learned how to setup a test environment properly. We learned how hardware can
affect the quality of the game. We learned also how to create a simple program in C++
using QT. We learned also how to use the tool netem in order to alter the quality of the
network. We also learned how an online game environment works and how to install a
steam game server in a Linux server.
We learned how to schedule a project using the Critical Path Method (CPM). In
developing the application, we analysed:
2

Which task must be carried out.

Where parallel activity can be performed.
C00164522 – Luca Venturelli
MOS Plugin
B.Sc. (Honours) Software Development

Resources needed to execute a project.

The sequence of activities, scheduling and timing involved.

Task priorities
We learned about server side and client side technologies. During the development of
the website we developed a simple website with HTML5.
4. Project Log
4.1 Project Proposal (Original)
Date: 17-09-2012
Target User: Online Game companies and online game users.
About Project
The main tasks to achieve are:
1. Analyse all the above-mentioned parameters and propose appropriate values;
2. Identify several suitable software development platforms;
3. Develop the proposed model using some of the identified software
development platforms
4. Test and adjust the distortion parameters values using the selected platforms;
5. Select the best working solution;
6. Consistency of the metric
7. Research Paper: at the end of the project we will write a research paper to
describe the results of our research.
4.2 Reasons behind Project
The proposed metric, which represents and includes an objective alternative, based on
network impairments, to the subjective game assessment, could have several applications:
a) Game service providers: the impact caused by network impairments that may arise
during a multi-player game session will be quantified by the MOS. Using the MOS,
the game service providers could enhance the online games quality and the overall
Quality of Service (QoS).
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C00164522 – Luca Venturelli
MOS Plugin
B.Sc. (Honours) Software Development
b) Game players: the MOS can be used to inform the game player about the game quality
at a point of time before starting and for the duration of playing the game. If the
player’s choice is to start/join an online game, the MOS will provide the game player
with a continuous feedback about the network state and game quality.
c) Game Developers: game developers could take into account the MOS in developing
and or adapting an aspect of the online game which may be affected by network
impairments.
d) Network Service Providers: those providers who aspire to the provision of large-scale
distributed interactive applications as part of their network service could use the MOS
to assist the policing of traffic and control congestion particularly at the access points
or in a wireless environment.
4.3 Proposed Technology, Languages & IDE
The initial technologies proposed for the project are stated below.
Application:

Qt - and C++ (Windows Platform)

Qt Creator (Editor)

Postgresql (SQL language)
Server:

Postgresql server

Steam Server for Linux

Debian 6.0 as Operating System
5. Task summary
5.1 Optional Tasks
In this section, we describe and discuss some of the optional tasks, due to time
constraints. If we had more time we could potentially complete the remaining given
tasks. The following tasks have not been done:
4

Test the metric on different games.

Repeat tests with different type of hardware.
C00164522 – Luca Venturelli
MOS Plugin
B.Sc. (Honours) Software Development
5.2 Issues
Some of the problems we came across during the project were the difficulty to set up
of the server and the management of the test scenario. An example would be during the
first test session the network was not properly affected by the setup done because the
network was affected directly from the server. This setting didn’t simulate the scenario
that usually online game players come across. After a careful analysis we decided to
create a separate network for the client pcs and connect them to the game server through a
router that was in charge of the affection of the network quality.
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C00164522 – Luca Venturelli