Designing a virtual environment for large audiences

Abstract

In this paper we describe our approach in creating a truly scalable distributed virtual environment. The resulting system should not only support large amounts of users, but it should also be able to work with a general purpose network like the Internet and it is intended to work with typical personal computers or game consoles. To realize this, we propose a distributed client-server approach in which most of the responsibilities are concentrated at the client side. The servers will only be used for control purposes — e.g. access control. Direct communication between clients helps preventing servers from becoming bottlenecks and the network load is kept low by distributing only the actions of a client instead of continuously distributing position updates. Finally, we also address some security related issues which arise from this client-oriented approach.