The Pacman Project
Overview
2.1 The PacMaas System
The goal of this project, as stated before, is to create a system that will allow players to participate in a live Pac-Man game in the streets of Maastricht. This game will be played by the aid of PDAs with GPS receivers to track the movement of the participating players. For this purpose, a PDA client was developed which would give advises to the player, like the Controllers do in the Pac-Manhattan game. This client gets the advises from a central server which keeps track of the game. Figure 2.1 shows a simplified overview of the PacMaas system. A game can be played by real players or as simulation, in wich case the webservice is not needed since it can run locally on the main server. Both simulation and PDAs therefore can play the game through a common interface, called AI Game. This game is populated by virtual players, which are steered by the PDA clients or the simulation algorithms.
Figure 2.1
2.2 The Server Structure
To ensure a game is always consistent, a central server was needed where all clients could retrieve the game information. For this purpose, an AXIS2 webserver was set up. This server contains the core of the game engine and provides some functionality for the clients through Remote Call Procedure (RPC). Since the core engine uses a MySQL database to store the map information of Maastricht, a separate database (DB) server was also needed. Finally, in order to host the website where the game could be monitored and reset, an Apache Webserver was set up which communicates with the AXIS2 webserver to retrieve the game information. The role of these servers will be explained in detail in the next chapter. The following diagram explains the structure:
Figure 2.2