Dots!

This project was a group effort. The other members of the group were Jessica Masters and Preethy Vaidyanathan.

Dots! is a Client-Server based system. A computer runs the Dots! Server, which Dots! game clients connect to. Users are then able to play against other people over the internet. There are two .jar files needed to set up a system: Dots!.jar and Dots! Server.jar. You can run a Dots! Server on any machine that supports JRE 1.3.1 or higher (we used both 1.3.1 and 1.4 in our development, 1.2 might be able to run handle it, but we didn't test it). If you choose to run your own server, be aware that both the client and server make extremely heavy use of threads. When testing the server performance, we found that more than about 250 players and 100 games caused the server to exceed the number of threads allowed in a process. Since this number varies from system to system, you may be able to handle a larger load then our test machines (the hard limit is 1024 games). On a dual PIII (both 700 MHz chips) and dual G4 (both 500 MHz chips), the processor load was generally well under 50%. See the paper for more details.