System Support for Scalable Distributed Virtual Worlds

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. Keywords Distributed Virtual Worlds, Object-Orientation, Event-Based Communication, Scale. INTRODUCTION Although a number of projects have considered support for multiuser, distributed interactive virtual worlds (VWS), most of the resulting systems have been small scale (supporting a maximum of 100 simultaneous users). Those projects which have addressed scale have for the most part been tied to a single application domain usually the development of large scale realistic military simulations. In curren..