HTML5DevConf: More Than Just WebSockets for Real-Time Multiplayer Games and Collaboration

We are very excited to report that Lightstreamer exhibited at the prestigious HTML5 Developers Conference held on October 22-23, 2013 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA. HTML5DevConf is one of the largest, best attended software developer conferences in the world. The event also included three days of training sessions, all of which sold out weeks in advance.

Alessandro Alinone, Lightstreamer’s Co-Founder and CTO, held a well attended session titled “More Than Just WebSockets for Real-Time Multiplayer Games and Collaboration”. Alessandro explained and demonstrated how some advanced optimization techniques, originally developed for the financial services industry in the last decade, can be applied to HTML5 games and collaboration systems.

>> Watch the video recording of Alessandro’s session and see the slide deck below

Alessandro mixed some theory with several live demos, which involved all the folks in the room (more than one hundred people). He showed in a very concrete way how dynamic throttling, applied to WebSockets, can make multiplayer games work even on unreliable network. Basically, the data flow streamed to each player adapts automatically to the available bandwidth and the current latency for each connection.

Lightstreamer was used for all the demonstrations. The full source code of these examples is available on GitHub:

Chat-Tile Demo
– https://github.com/Weswit/Lightstreamer-example-ChatTile-client-javascript
– https://github.com/Weswit/Lightstreamer-example-ChatTile-adapter-java

Room-Ball Demo
– https://github.com/Weswit/Lightstreamer-example-RoomBall-client-javascript
– https://github.com/Weswit/Lightstreamer-example-RoomBall-adapter-java

Super Mario Demo
– https://github.com/Weswit/Lightstreamer-example-FullScreenMario-client-javascript
– https://github.com/Weswit/Lightstreamer-example-FullScreenMario-adapter-java

3D World Demo
– https://github.com/Weswit/Lightstreamer-example-3DWorld-client-javascript
– https://github.com/Weswit/Lightstreamer-example-3DWorld-adapter-java

More information on the optimization techniques is available in the article Optimizing Multiplayer 3D Game Synchronization Over the Web.

The Booth

Lightstreamer also had the pleasure to host a booth, in which we exhibited our product and demonstrated a number of its possible applications for different domains, including multiplayer gaming, collaboration systems, telemetry, the Internet of Things, and many others.

Thanks to all the amazing people we had the opportunity to meet and talk to during these days!