Abstract
Distributed Virtual Environments are becoming more popular in today's computing and communications among people. Perhaps the most widely used form of such environments is Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG), which are in the form of client/server architecture that requires considerable server resources to manage a large number of distributed players. Peer-to-peer communication can achieve scalability at lower cost but may introduce other difficulties. Synchronous communication is a prime concern for multi-user collaborative applications like MMOGs where players need frequently interaction with each other to share their game states. In this article, we present a hybrid MMOG architecture called MM-VISA (Massively Multiuser VIrtual Simulation Architecture). In this architecture, servers and peers are coupled together to take the inherent advantages of the centralized architecture and the scalability of distributed systems. As the virtual world is decomposed into smaller manageable zones, the players' random movement causes reorganization at the P2P overlay structure. The frequent nature of movements along with unintelligent zone crossing approaches, currently implemented in MMOGs, breaks synchronous communication. To limit such problem, we consider players' gaming characteristics to intelligently define routing paths. A graph-theoretic framework is incorporated for overlay oriented real-time distributed virtual environments. We shall show that interest-driven zone crossing, dynamic shared region between adjacent zones, and clustering of entities based on their attributes significantly decrease unstable overlay situations. The effectiveness of the presented system is justified through simulation.
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