Online, real-time game playing with serving of pages of information to a multitude of players
First Claim
1. Apparatus comprising:
- a machine readable medium storing a set of program instructions, said instructions comprising instructions for displaying a game lobby page on a user interface of a computing device, wherein the game lobby page displays information as to a game type available for play over a computer network and, for the game type, information as to individual instances of games of said game type or players playing in games of the game type, and wherein the game lobby page includes a page icon wherein information on additional instances of said games or players playing in games of the game type not included on the lobby page may be requested from a gaming server in the form of an additional page or pages.
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Accused Products
Abstract
A central gaming server transmits game lobby pages to a multitude of distributed computing devices accessing a gaming website or websites over a network such as the Internet. To overcome scalability problems in keeping the lobby displays up-to-date and accurate in all the participating distributed workstations, particularly in a dynamic gaming environment where hundreds or thousands of games may be going on simultaneously, game or player data in the lobby displays is transmitted as individual pages along with icons by which the users of the computing devices can request additional pages. Updates are performed for only the displayed pages. This approach provides a significant improvement in server and network performance over prior techniques in which all game statistics for a particular selected type of game (or statistics on all the current players) was sent to each workstation and the workstation would scroll through the entire data set as necessary to view all the game or player data.
77 Citations
27 Claims
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1. Apparatus comprising:
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a machine readable medium storing a set of program instructions, said instructions comprising instructions for displaying a game lobby page on a user interface of a computing device, wherein the game lobby page displays information as to a game type available for play over a computer network and, for the game type, information as to individual instances of games of said game type or players playing in games of the game type, and wherein the game lobby page includes a page icon wherein information on additional instances of said games or players playing in games of the game type not included on the lobby page may be requested from a gaming server in the form of an additional page or pages. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6)
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7. A gaming server providing updated game information to a plurality of distributed computing devices engaging in game playing over a computer network, comprising:
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a processing unit;
a database coupled to the processing unit storing game information data for a plurality of instances of games, wherein the database is updated to store real-time or near real time information as to the plurality of instances of games, and wherein the gaming server provides periodic updates to displays of instances of games to the plurality of distributed computing devices by means of transmitting pages of said data, and wherein game information for instances of a game type not included in the pages of data are not periodically updated at the computing devices, thereby improving the ability of said server to update the plurality of distributed computing devices in real time or substantial real time without substantial degradation in performance of the gaming server. - View Dependent Claims (8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 26, 27)
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14. A method of periodically updating displays of game information on a plurality of distributed computing devices connected to a server over a computer network, comprising the steps of:
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presenting game information as to a plurality of instances of games on the display of the plurality of distributed computing devices in the form of a page of game information;
maintaining state information at the server, including the current page displayed for each of the distributed computing devices; and
the server periodically updating the displayed page on each of the distributed computing devices by transmitting an updated page to each of the distributed computing devices, wherein only the displayed page at the distributed computing devices is updated and wherein game information for other instances of games not included in the page of game information are not updated at the computing devices. - View Dependent Claims (15, 16, 17, 18, 19)
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20. A method of providing game lobby pages to a multitude of distributed computing devices connected to a server over a computer network, the game lobby page displaying information for a plurality of instances of games, comprising the steps of:
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receiving a request for a game lobby page from each of the multitude of distributed computing devices; and
transmitting a game lobby page from the gaming server to each of the multitude of distributed computing devices, wherein each game lobby page includes an icon providing the user with the ability to request additional pages and wherein information, if requested, for instances of games not displayed on the game lobby page is requested and transmitted to each of the multitude of distributed computing devices as one or more pages. - View Dependent Claims (21, 22, 23, 24, 25)
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Specification