Kiwano: A scalable distributed infrastructure for virtual worlds

Abstract

In today's virtual worlds, even in the massively multi-player games, the number of avatars together in a virtual place barely reaches thousands. Regarding the billions of users dwelling the web, this is astonishingly low. In this paper we identify spatial indexation as the bottleneck that impedes scalability and we propose Kiwano, a distributed system to scale up to millions and more. In order to split the load, Kiwano dynamically divides the space in zones, each having a server maintaining a spatial index of all moving objects within the zone. This allows to timely compute which objects are in the neighborhood of any avatar. Thus, knowing its immediate environment, the client is able compute the local scene.

Manycraft: Scaling minecraft to millions

“…Recently, some of us released Kiwano [13], a cloud based solution to scale virtual worlds by handling the avatar movement apart. Kiwano offers a streaming API where avatars report theirs positions and get notified of the events in the neighborhood; the static elements are provided by other means.…”

“…Kiwano [13] is a scalable distributed infrastructure for virtual worlds, designed to support an unlimited number of moving objects updating their position at arbitrary high frequencies. In Kiwano the set of moving entities is distributed onto many servers, each taking care of a group of entities based on their geographical proximity.…”

Yardstick

“…Technology-related, Minecraft fosters an active and sizable modding community, which has already created over 38,000 customized modules to alter the gameplay of Minecraft. 6 Modding is not supported by the official (vanilla) Minecraft distribution provided by Mojang; hence, the modding communities have created several other implementations of the Minecraft server-protocol to support their customizations: the mod-friendly servers include Spigot [12], Sponge, and Glowstone [16].…”

OneSim

“…With Kiwano [4], we have taken a radical approach: users can see and interact only with their "neighbors". Kiwano's neighboring relation is designed such that the number of neighbors remains roughly constant regardless of the avatar density distribution.…”