This page lists all projects created for the Combine in collaboration with Universities or other academic Purposes.

The Star Wars Combine is an extremely rich development environment and test platform for new technologies. One of the researched goals is to interest students from all over the world to work on useful projects and innovative developments. The Combine is always ready to coach University or College thesis, senior projects or any other important projects. The main areas of interest include: networked virtual environment, distributed applications, distributed database applications, programming, project management, Web technologies (Web Services, Web Semantic, XML, XHTML...) but also some more social aspects like socialization.

Any student looking to work for an ongoing project and wanting his work to be useful may propose a subject to the Combine. Any request must include the University name and country, the ongoing studies and final diploma, the lessons title and description, and the desired project title and description. Naturally, the student will have first to obtain the permission from his university. If interested or if you have questions, please mail to the Sim Master.

The goal of this work was to create an infrastructure to allow faction management tools to automatically update their data with the information maintained on the game server. The web services technology was chosen for the various advantages it offers. The new component has been implemented successfully and has been appreciated by many faction tool developers.

While this technology is already widely accepted in the business world, its use in a game context is totally new. It seems that Web Services have gained their place in the game world and will continue to be developed. Hopefully, this experiment will convince other game designers to adapt their platforms in a similar manner.

Some groups asynchronously discuss real-life topics (e.g., real-life discussion groups on message boards); others in role-play games use pseudo-identities and communicate synchronously (e.g., Multi User Domains or MUDs) or asynchronously (message board role-play communities). Role-play is believed to allow experimentation identity, and asynchronous communication was theorized to allow more time to compose one's responses. This study examined how role-play and asynchronous communication benefits introverted people. Specifically, introverts who participated in asynchronous message board role-play communities were theorized to feel truly themselves online as opposed to offline, report talking about themselves more in different ways (more self-disclosure aspects), and less loneliness in their online communities compared to introverts who were more restricted in their self-presentation (e.g., in real-life discussions and in MUDs). I also explored how social benefits were related to involvement in online communities, sense of community, and experience communicating online.

Three hundred thirty four participants recruited from all three types of Internet communities (note: including the Star Wars Combine) completed surveys from the range of geographical locations in which U.S. citizens live. Online community members were significantly lonelier and more introverted than normal. Participation in online communities was typically equivalent to a part-time job (two hours per day, seven days per week) with medium or high levels of involvement and a fairly high sense of community. Participants categorized themselves most often as "Veterans" at communicating online and felt they were truly themselves between offline and online lives. Typically, self-disclosure within online communities was characterized by moderately high intent to self-disclose, moderate amount (duration and frequency), moderate positive and negative aspects that they share, moderately low dishonesty or inaccuracy, and moderately low control of depth (intentional intimacy). Participants approached the study in a valid manner, taking the study seriously and not attempting to deceive.

Introversion was related to greater amounts of self-disclosure, dishonesty and inaccuracy, loneliness, and related to less depth (intimacy) of disclosure. Amount of self-disclosure, and dishonest or inaccurate disclosures, were related more loneliness. Either talking about oneself more leads to more loneliness, or lonely people simply tend to talk about themselves more than those who are less lonely online. No community type (message board role-plays, MUDs, and message board real-life discussions) was more or less socially beneficial than any other. This means that lonely people online weren't lonely because of the type of online community they are associated with (be it role-play or not), they were lonely because they were introverted. Introverts were less likely to feel a high sense of community than extroverted people, and sense of community was associated with less loneliness. It was most common to find "Veterans" or "Experts" at communicating online in synchronous role-play communities. Those with "Intermediate" experience endorsed feeling truly themselves offline more than those with greater experience. "Veterans" and "Experienced" online communicators typically endorsed feeling truly themselves between online and offline.

The variable that was most related to social benefits was level of involvement in one's online community. Highly involved participants tended to feel like they were really themselves online and reported less loneliness in their online communities than those who were moderately or minimally involved. Recall how online community members in general were lonelier than normal. In-fact, when community members were highly involved, they were not lonelier than normal. While introverts were no more likely to be highly involved than extroverts, this may be good news. High level of involvement appears to be beneficial, and every type online community member (introverted or extroverted) was just as likely to be highly involved. Interestingly, MUD players rated themselves as highly involved more frequently than other community types.

Future studies may look at whether role-play (or synchronous communication) in general is particularly involving, and therefore, particularly beneficial. This study was a "snap-shot" in time of online communities, and future research could look at how people benefit socially over time in online communities. Do introverted people become less lonely over time because they self-disclose more often and for longer periods of time than extroverted people? Similarly, research could include non-US citizens and represent the Internet as a whole � a method I could not use given time restrictions and the red tape involved in cross-national studies. Additionally, level of involvement appears to be an important factor in gaining social benefits online and could benefit from future research. Do introverted people gain social skills online that can be transferred offline? Or, could online communities provide an independent outlet for social and emotional needs without the need to transfer anything into "real life" at all? These are questions open to future studies that may lead to positive real-world implications for Internet users in general and introverts in particular.

The purpose of this paper is not only to provide a comprehensive overview of the project and how it is designed and managed, but also to share the experience accumulated in five years of development. It is our strong belief that the Star Wars Combine online game can teach a few lessons to many.

The design and implementation of net-VEs create several problems: managing consistent distributed information, contending with limited network bandwidth, processing and rendering resources, and supporting a large user base. Increasing numbers of computer scientists are beginning to develop infrastructure for net-VEs, develop net-VE applications on these infrastructures, and use net-VEs in day-to-day work. Rather than starting anew, these developers and users can be more effective in their work by learning the techniques used by existing systems.

The purpose of this report is to propose an architecture solution to the scalability problem of net-VEs, and particularly how to support more users in net-VEs. We expose how we partition the virtual environment, and for each partitioning, we describe a model of architecture based on a client-server system using several servers. We also relate the successful implementation of a prototype based on one of our models, and which supports an existing online application.

This paper will first define the key concepts associated to net-VEs, and we will illustrate these concepts while summarizing the evolution of net-VEs. We will then detail the taxonomy of net-VE, and their related problems. As we will see, these problems are related to the network and to the architecture of the system. The conclusion of this analysis will serve as basis for the next part where we will expose our architecture solutions. Finally, the next chapter will describe the implementation of our prototype.