Bringing Database Management Systems and Video Game Engines Together

Abstract

As video games gained more popularity through the years and became increasingly more complex, the share of operations on large amounts of data within games rose as well. This trend shifts the focus from mere implementation of functionality to the challenge of maintaining, browsing, and processing large amounts of data. While video game engines are gradually rediscovering concepts that are well-known in the relational world of databases by implementing them in an imperative style, it stands to reason to meet midway and instead implement data-heavy operations on the side of the database management system (DBMS) for increased data locality. This thesis explores what databases can bring to the table beside their already powerful capabilities of querying data when involving databases beyond their role of simple data storages. For that purpose, typical components of video game engines, that one would usually expect to find in the imperative parts of a video game, are explored and evaluated in terms of their feasibility and usability when implemented in SQL. Existing intersections between database management systems and video games engines are pointed out in the introduction. The following chapter covers AI in video games on the example of Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) and deterministic finite automatons (DFAs), after which the generation of playing fields using either rule sets or predefined building blocks is covered. As third and final component, path finding, specifically A*, within the database is explored, with an optional expansion into the temporal dimension of the search space. Each chapter features a section in which the suitability of the examined component in combination with a DBMS is laid out, describing if the component is either suited for online usage, as in the case of pathfinding and MCTS or DFAs respectively, or should mainly be used offline to make use of the storage capabilities of DBMSs, as is the case for terrain generation. The thesis is wrapped up with a general evaluation of the marriage between DBMSs and video game engines, finding that while not revolutionising the gaming industry overnight, DBMSs can enhance video game development in the long run.