Niantic, Inc.

Mingliang Wei

Daniel Casadevall Pino

Charu Janqid

Jiahuan Liu

Laura Tang

Michael Chang

Maoyang Li

A push gateway brokers messages between backend services and client devices connected to the gateway. The gateway includes a plurality of messaging frontend servers, a messaging database, and a plurality of topic servers. The messaging frontend servers manage the socket connections connecting the client devices to the push gateway. The messaging database is a key-value database that subscribes messaging frontend servers to topics. The topic servers receive publish requests from the backend servers to identify subscribed messaging frontend servers in the messaging database to push messages out to. The frontend messaging servers subsequently push out the message to the client devices subscribed to the topic. The gateway can aggregate player counts from a plurality of geographical regions based on the socket connections hosted by the messaging frontend servers. With the player counts, the gateway can generate a player density map, e.g., for socket load balancing, or for a gameplay feature.

Push gateway for player density map generation in a mobile gaming application

The virtual location of a player in a location-based game is determined from the real-world location of the player's client device. The location-based game provides the player access to one or more chat room based on their location. To determine the locations of chat room, a server analyzes player locations in a geographic region, clusters player locations to identify centroids, and adjusts the clusters based on constraints. The server selects chat room locations (e.g., at points of interest) to more evenly balance the number of players in each chat room while complying with one or more restraints on the size of the geographic area served by each chat room.

Player density based region division for regional chat

A push gateway brokers messages between backend services and client devices connected to the gateway. The gateway includes a plurality of messaging frontend servers, a messaging database, and a plurality of topic servers. The messaging frontend servers manage the socket connections connecting the client devices to the push gateway. The messaging frontend servers may further monitor the socket connections, collecting analytical data on the client devices and the connections. The messaging database is a key-value database that subscribes messaging frontend servers to topics. The topic servers receive publish requests from the backend servers to identify subscribed messaging frontend servers in the messaging database to push messages out to. The frontend messaging servers subsequently push out the message to the client devices subscribed to the topic.

Growing community of inventors

San Jose, CA, United States of America

Mingliang Wei