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Area of Simulation: Mechanism and Architecture for Multi-Avatar Virtual Environments

Published:24 August 2015Publication History
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Abstract

Although Multi-Avatar Distributed Virtual Environments (MAVEs) such as Real-Time Strategy (RTS) games entertain daily hundreds of millions of online players, their current designs do not scale. For example, even popular RTS games such as the StarCraft series support in a single game instance only up to 16 players and only a few hundreds of avatars loosely controlled by these players, which is a consequence of the Event-Based Lockstep Simulation (EBLS) scalability mechanism they employ. Through empirical analysis, we show that a single Area of Interest (AoI), which is a scalability mechanism that is sufficient for single-avatar virtual environments (such as Role-Playing Games), also cannot meet the scalability demands of MAVEs. To enable scalable MAVEs, in this work we propose Area of Simulation (AoS), a new scalability mechanism, which combines and extends the mechanisms of AoI and EBLS. Unlike traditional AoI approaches, which employ only update-based operational models, our AoS mechanism uses both event-based and update-based operational models to manage not single, but multiple areas of interest. Unlike EBLS, which is traditionally used to synchronize the entire virtual world, our AoS mechanism synchronizes only selected areas of the virtual world. We further design an AoS-based architecture, which is able to use both our AoS and traditional AoI mechanisms simultaneously, dynamically trading-off consistency guarantees for scalability. We implement and deploy this architecture and we demonstrate that it can operate with an order of magnitude more avatars and a larger virtual world without exceeding the resource capacity of players' computers.

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  • Published in

    cover image ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications
    ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications  Volume 12, Issue 1
    August 2015
    220 pages
    ISSN:1551-6857
    EISSN:1551-6865
    DOI:10.1145/2816987
    Issue’s Table of Contents

    Copyright © 2015 ACM

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    • Published: 24 August 2015
    • Accepted: 1 April 2015
    • Revised: 1 September 2014
    • Received: 1 May 2014
    Published in tomm Volume 12, Issue 1

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