ROAR: Benchmarking LMM Agents under Real-Time Constraints in Multiplayer Action-Shooter Games
Organizations: Newcastle University · University of Auckland · CTW Inc.
Abstract
Large multimodal models (LMMs) are increasingly deployed as agents that perceive, reason, and act in interactive multi-agent environments. Yet most existing benchmarks for LMM-based agents in multi-agent settings remain turn-based: the environment and other agents pause while an agent performs inference. Such protocols obscure a fundamental challenge of real-time constraints, where the world continues to evolve and delayed decisions may become outdated before execution. Motivated by this limitation, we introduce ROAR, a multiplayer action-shooter game environment for evaluating LMM-based agents in multi-agent settings under real-time constraints. ROAR covers cooperative, competitive, mixed cooperative-competitive, and basic single-agent scenarios. We further propose a Multi-Agent Asynchronous Gym interface that decouples environment evolution from agent reasoning by running the environment and each agent in separate threads, enabling the environment to advance at fixed time intervals without waiting for LMM inference and allowing agents to reason independently without blocking one another. ROAR also features convenient deployment, multimodal observations, and customizable levels. ROAR offers a practical testbed for advancing LMM-based agents beyond static, turn-based evaluation toward real-time multi-agent decision-making.
Figures & tables
| Model | Latency (ms) | (ms) | Coop. | Comp. | Mixed | Single | Avg. | Shooting | Incoming |
| GPT-5.4 | P50: 1458.5 P90: 1946.1 | Turn-based | 0.31 | 0.54 | 0.65 | 0.38 | 0.47 | 0.54 | 0.26 |
| 250 | 0.26 | 0.29 | 0.71 | ||||||
| 40 | 0.33 | 0.30 | 0.19 | 0.07 | 0.88 | ||||
| Gemini-3.1 Pro | P50: 3235.2 P90: 3995.3 | Turn-based | 0.78 | 0.82 | 0.85 | 0.93 | 0.87 | 0.82 | 0.31 |
| 250 | 0.68 | 0.71 | 0.44 | 0.61 | 0.66 | ||||
| 40 | 0.54 | 0.63 | 0.34 | 0.23 | 0.89 |
| Model | Latency (ms) | (ms) | Coop. | Comp. | Mixed | Single | Avg. | Shooting | Incoming |
| Gemma-4 31B | P50: 300.6 P90: 603.9 | Turn-based | 0.24 | 0.43 | 0.51 | 0.38 | 0.39 | 0.32 | 0.41 |
| 250 | 0.19 | 0.36 | 0.47 | 0.31 | 0.33 | 0.27 | 0.47 | ||
| 40 | 0.08 | 0.25 | 0.28 | 0.13 | 0.19 | 0.11 | 0.62 | ||
| Qwen-3.5 27B | P50: 207.6 P90: 478.9 | Turn-based | 0.21 | 0.45 | 0.54 | 0.36 | 0.39 | 0.33 | 0.45 |
| 250 | 0.18 | 0.40 | 0.52 | 0.31 | 0.35 | 0.29 | 0.56 | ||
| 40 | 0.11 | 0.25 | 0.30 | 0.15 | 0.20 | 0.17 | 0.67 |
| Analysis | Model | Variant | Latency P50 / P90 (ms) | Coop. Turn-based | Coop. 250 ms | Coop. 40 ms |
| Control Mode Ablation | Gemini-3.1 Pro | Decentralized | 3235.2 / 3995.3 | |||
| Centralized | 4910.1 / 6567.5 | |||||
| Qwen-3.5 9B | Decentralized | 96.6 / 226.5 | ||||
| Centralized | 187.4 / 362.2 | |||||
| Agentic Framework Ablation | Gemini-3.1 Pro | Direct | 3235.2 / 3995.3 | |||
| Agentic | 5880.1 / 7519.6 |
Appendix figures & tables18 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Environment | Model | Latency P50/P90 (ms) | TB | Relative Drop | ||
| TeamCraft | Gemini-3.1 Pro | 2575.7 / 3498.1 | 0.45 | 0.45 | 0.40 | 0.11 |
| Gemma-4 31B | 252.0 / 578.2 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 | N/A | |
| TDW-Cook | Gemini-3.1 Pro | 2821.9 / 3793.5 | 0.55 | 0.55 | 0.55 | 0.00 |
| Gemma-4 31B | 238.4 / 533.8 | 0.05 | 0.05 | 0.05 | 0.00 | |
| ROAR (Ours) | Gemini-3.1 Pro | 3128.2 / 4005.5 | 0.70 | 0.45 | 0.05 | 0.93 |
| Gemma-4 31B | 295.2 / 612.1 | 0.20 | 0.15 | 0.00 | 1.00 |
| Parameter | Value | Parameter | Value |
| ToxicZoneDamagePerSecond | 35 | ToxicZoneDamageRandomRange | 5 |
| ToxicZoneShrinkDistancePerSecond | 0.245 | TurretAttackRadius | 13 |
| TurretHealthValue | 100 | TurretAttackValue | 40 |
| TurretAttackRandomRange | 5 | PlayerHealthValue | 100 |
| PlayerAttackValue | 20 | PlayerAttackRandomRange | 5 |
| PlayerAmmoCapacity | 30 | ShootAudibleRange | 100 |
| Model | Coop. | Comp. | Mixed | Single | Avg. | Shooting | Incoming | |
| GPT-5.4 | TB | |||||||
| 250 | ||||||||
| 40 | ||||||||
| Gemini-3.1 Pro | TB | |||||||
| 250 | ||||||||
| 40 |
| Model | Coop. | Comp. | Mixed | Single | Avg. | Shooting | Incoming | |
| Gemma-4 31B | TB | |||||||
| 250 | ||||||||
| 40 | ||||||||
| Qwen-3.5 27B | TB | |||||||
| 250 | ||||||||
| 40 |
| Model | Surv. Time (s) | Kills | Coins | Turrets | Deaths | Eff. Act. Freq. | |
| Gemma-4 31B | TB | ||||||
| 250 | |||||||
| 40 | |||||||
| Qwen-3.5 27B | TB | ||||||
| 250 | |||||||
| 40 |
| (ms) | Injected Delay (ms) | Total Latency P50/P90 (ms) | Coop. | Comp. vs. Bot | Mixed vs. Bot | Single | Avg. |
| TB | 0 | – | |||||
| 250 | 0 | ||||||
| 250 | 250 | ||||||
| 250 | 1000 | ||||||
| 250 | 3000 |
| (ms) | Injected Delay (ms) | Shooting | Incoming | Surv. Time (s) | Kills | Coins | Turrets | Deaths | Eff. Act. Freq. |
| TB | 0 | ||||||||
| 250 | 0 | ||||||||
| 250 | 250 | ||||||||
| 250 | 1000 | ||||||||
| 250 | 3000 |
| Observation Modalities | Latency P50/P90 (ms) | Coop. | Single | Avg. | Shooting | Incoming |
| Text only (Turn-based) | 1532.2 / 2341.5 | 0.23 0.03 | 0.31 0.02 | 0.27 0.02 | 0.11 0.01 | 0.56 0.03 |
| Pixel only (Turn-based) | 2861.7 / 3601.4 | 0.66 0.01 | 0.72 0.04 | 0.69 0.03 | 0.79 0.05 | 0.39 0.04 |
| Pixel + Text (Turn-based) | 3046.7 / 4008.9 | 0.78 0.04 | 0.93 0.05 | 0.86 0.03 | 0.82 0.04 | 0.31 0.02 |
| Pixel + Text + Depth (Turn-based) | 3663.5 / 4785.6 | 0.81 0.03 | 0.95 0.04 | 0.88 0.03 | 0.83 0.03 | 0.29 0.02 |
| Pixel + Text + Depth + Audio (Turn-based) | 3847.6 / 4965.8 | 0.85 0.05 | 0.95 0.03 | 0.90 0.04 | 0.85 0.06 | 0.28 0.02 |
| Text only (250 ms) | 1532.2 / 2341.5 | 0.08 0.01 | 0.15 0.01 | 0.12 0.02 | 0.05 0.04 | 0.78 0.07 |
| Model | Single | Shooting | Incoming | Latency P50/P90 (ms) | |
| Gemma E4B (Base) | Turn-based | 0.06 0.01 | 0.00 0.00 | 0.67 0.04 | 62.1 / 129.8 |
| 250 ms | 0.00 0.00 | 0.00 0.00 | 0.69 0.04 | 62.1 / 129.8 | |
| 40 ms | 0.00 0.00 | 0.00 0.00 | 0.75 0.03 | 62.1 / 129.8 | |
| Gemma E4B (RL fine-tuning) | Turn-based | 0.17 0.02 | 0.11 0.02 | 0.59 0.03 | 68.3 / 126.8 |
| 250 ms | 0.14 0.03 | 0.10 0.02 | 0.63 0.04 | 68.3 / 126.8 | |
| 40 ms | 0.08 0.02 | 0.07 0.01 | 0.70 0.05 | 68.3 / 126.8 |
| N agents | Game State | Pixel | Pixel + Depth | Memory (GB) |
| P50 / P90 (ms) | P50 / P90 (ms) | P50 / P90 (ms) | ||
| 4 | 2.3 / 3.2 | 5.8 / 6.1 | 12.6 / 15.3 | 0.20 |
| 8 | 6.2 / 9.1 | 18.7 / 23.4 | 35.3 / 38.4 | 0.21 |
| 12 | 15.2 / 17.6 | 35.9 / 38.5 | 43.5 / 49.1 | 0.21 |
| 16 | 22.6 / 27.8 | 56.5 / 60.9 | 76.3 / 82.0 | 0.22 |
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