Title :
Distributing Pedestrians in a Virtual Environment
Author :
Haciomeroglu, M. ; Laycock, R.G. ; Day, A.M.
Abstract :
The current expansion of multi-player online games has promoted the growth of large scale distributed virtual environments (DVEs). In these systems, peer-to-peer architectures have been proved as the most scalable scheme for supporting massively multi-player applications. Nevertheless, the interactions among clients that can take place in this type of systems can lead to the temporal saturation of some of the clients. Since a client saturation has an effect on other clients, these situations limit the performance of peer-to-peer DVEs. In this paper, we propose an adaptive technique for avoiding the saturation of the client computers in DVE systems based on peer-to-peer architectures. This technique is based on monitoring the client state and discarding some of the messages received from other clients when the client is close to saturation. The evaluation results show that the proposed method improves the system performance without having an effect on the awareness rate, regardless of the movement pattern that avatars can follow. As a result, both the performance and the scalability of peer-to-peer DVEs are significantly improved.
Keywords :
computer games; distributed processing; peer-to-peer computing; virtual reality; client computers; client state monitoring; large scale distributed virtual environments; massively multiplayer applications; multiplayer online games; peer-to-peer DVEs; peer-to-peer architectures; peer-to-peer distributed virtual environments; saturation avoidance technique; Analytical models; Animation; Automatic control; Context modeling; Humans; Layout; Navigation; Roads; System testing; Virtual environment;
Conference_Titel :
Cyberworlds, 2007. CW '07. International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Hannover
Print_ISBN :
978-0-7695-3005-5