Making WAVES: On the Design of Architectures for Low-end Distributed Virtual Environments

nd parallelism. In particular, we examine what it means to distribute functionality such as simulation, interaction detection and messaging in a virtual world, how to "scale up" such a world, and how to deal with communication delays. 2 Current Approaches to Distribution Current approaches to architectures for virtual world rely upon either a client-server architecture, or upon a static allocation of processes to processors, which communicate among each other along predetermined paths [4] [5] [12] [13]. These architectures pose two potential problems for scale-up: 1. Point to point models fall apart when object communication is many-to-many. That is, in a simulation with 100 independent but closely interacting entities a point-to-point communication model would mean potentially sending 10,000 distinct messages at each time slice in order to handle interactions properly. 2. In broadcast models, much of the information being communicated between participants i