System support for scalable distributed virtual worlds

Abstract

Lack of bandwidth has been shown to be a major impediment to achieving realism in large scale virtual worlds with many interacting entities. Recent projects that have addressed this problem have, for the most part, been tied to a single application domain, typically the development of realistic military simulations. This paper presents a brief overview of the techniques to achieve scale adopted by the object execution environment of the VOID shell, a virtual world development toolkit.

Generic support for distributed applications

“…Our scheme scales well because it allows sourceside filtering rather than requiring filtering at a centralized server or at the client. Other schemes multicast events and filter them at the client, 7 putting an unnecessary load on the communications infrastructure and clients. Consider the example of tracking users worldwide.…”