About the Jomini Engine

The JominiEngine is an emerging, distributed, scalable game engine for historical massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). Core game and system design principles of this engine are historical accuracy of the game model and scalability of the system to large numbers of players. The intended application domain is education in history, to provide an "interactive history“ experience. Specifically, the engine has been instantiated to a concrete game, Overlord: Age of Magna Carta, a game set on mainland Britain in the time period of 1194-1225.

The implementation of the game engine focuses on modularity, extensibility and scalability, so that it can be instantiated for different time periods, and extended to also cover different application domains. We therefore view this game engine as a "motherboard“ for developing educational tools with varying topic areas and learning objectives. Technically outstanding features of the implementation are the use of Riak as a non-SQL database and of C# as a programming language.

This research is supported by the SICSA Challenge grant (networking grant): JominiEngine: A Serious Game Engine Across Learning Domains.

Selected Publications

A poster describing the Jomini Engine is available here.

  • Hans-Wolfgang Loidl and Sandy Louchart
    "The Jomini Engine: a historical MMORPG framework"
    In PWH16: Playing with History, August 2016, Abertay University, Dundee.
    .pdf, slides
  • Yuanqi Zhu.
    "Clients for a massively multi-player on-line historical RPG"
    MSc Software Engineering Thesis, Heriot-Watt University, Aug 2019.
    .pdf
  • Helen Rankin.
    "Improving the Security and Correctness of a Historical Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game Server"
    MEng Software Engineering Thesis, Heriot-Watt University, Apr 2016.
    Awarded: Cooper-Walker Engineering Ltd Prize for " outstanding project work in a degree programme in the Department of Computer Science", Heriot-Watt, 2015/16.
    .pdf
  • David A. Bond, Hans-Wolfgang Loidl, Sandy Louchart.
    "Design and Implementation of the Jomini Engine: Towards a historical Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game"
    In The Games and Learning Alliance conference (GALA 2015), Rome, Italy, Dec 9-11, 2015. LNCS 9599, p. 441-451, Springer.
    .pdf, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-40216-1_49
  • David A. Bond.
    "Design and implementation of a massively multi-player online historical role-playing game"
    MSc Thesis, Heriot-Watt University, 2015. Awarded: Best MSc thesis in Computer Science, Heriot-Watt, 2014/15.
    .pdf

Code Repository

The source code for the Jomini Engine is hosted at this github repository.

Design and Development Team

  • Hans-Wolfgang Loidl, (Team Leader) Heriot-Watt University
  • David A. Bond, (initial implementation) Heriot-Watt University
  • Sandy Jean-Jacques Louchart, (game design) Glasgow School of Arts
  • Helen Rankin, (game extensions, security) Heriot-Watt University
  • Sebastian Zebrowski, (game extensions and interface) Heriot-Watt University

Contact

For more information on the JominiEngine, feel free to email me: h . w . loidl . hwu | at | gmail PUNKT com

For other ways of contacting me, please visit my home page.