About

 

 

What is the application supposed to do

The development of the application will follow four main phases. In the first phase we developed a plug-in to automatically evaluate the game quality based on the metric developed. In the second phase a test environment has been built and a first session of tests with a group of users took place. In the third phase the data collected have been analysed and new parameters for the metric has been proposed. In the fourth phase we start a new test phase in which the experience of the user has been compared with the result of the metric evaluation.

 

The new metric developed

Most of existent game quality assessment models take into consideration only network impairments therefore the measured games quality is only correlated with the network impairments (delay, jitter and to a limited extent packet loss). To estimate the players overall perception of games experience (quality) our proposed model extends the traditional objective game quality methods by introducing the end-user experience/knowledge. As shown in Figure 1 the model uses the following parameters:

1. end-user experience.
2. distortions introduced by game client equipment (memory, graphic card) and I/O devices (screen, keyboard, and joystick)
3. distortions introduced by the network (end-to-end delay, jitter, packet loss)
4. distortions introduced by game server (number of users, game type, game capability to adapt to network distortions).

Using the above-mentioned parameters a Game Rating Factor (GRF) is pro- posed. The GRF is inspired from an International Telecommunication Union; Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) recommended computa- tional model (E-model). The model is used to assess the combined effects of variation in several parameters that may affect end-user perception of speech quality. The computation of the GRF can be described as follows: a maximum value that reflects the highest level of game quality will be reduced in proportion with the distortions caused by various impairment parameters. Mathematically, GRF can be calculated using the following equation:

GRF = (GRF M AXIGCDIN + A) ∗ IGS

where

• GRFMAX is the maximum Game Rating Factor (90)
• IGCD: impairment factor representing all impairments due to Game Client and I/O device
• IN: impairment factor representing all impairments due to network con- nection between the game server and game client
• IGS: impairment factor representing all impairments due to Game Server (0 or 1)
• A: represents the end-user hands on experience with online games (max 10)