Abstract
The explosive growth of the number of applications based on networked virtual environment technology, both games and virtual communities, shows that these types of applications have become commonplace in a short period of time. However, from a research point of view, the inherent weaknesses in their architectures are quickly exposed. The Architecture for Large-Scale Virtual Interactive Communities (ALVICs) was originally developed to serve as a generic framework to deploy networked virtual environment applications on the Internet. While it has been shown to effectively scale to the numbers originally put forward, our findings have shown that, on a real-life network, such as the Internet, several drawbacks will not be overcome in the near future. It is, therefore, that we have recently started with the development of ALVIC-NG, which, while incorporating the findings from our previous research, makes several improvements on the original version, making it suitable for deployment on the Internet as it exists today.
Highlights
Witness the media attention that applications such as Second Life [1] and There [2] have gathered, it should be obvious that the technology behind them is an important subject of study
A different approach is taken by Second Life, a single-instance virtual world, where the virtual land is split up into several regions, each managed by a single server
We investigated an alternative architecture, able to support the same numbers of users that are needed for todays’ applications, that is, the Architecture for Large-Scale Virtual Interactive communities (ALVICs) [5]
Summary
Witness the media attention that applications such as Second Life [1] and There [2] have gathered, it should be obvious that the technology behind them is an important subject of study. Looking at examples of [3] or [4], the authors point out that architectures scale up to a maximum of tens of users Comparing this to a modern-day application such as Second Life, which claims to have around 1.3 million active residents (a subject of debate), or World of Warcraft, with around 10 million active subscribers, these numbers do seem ridiculously low. A different approach is taken by Second Life, a single-instance virtual world, where the virtual land is split up into several regions, each managed by a single server While this approach is definitely simple to implement, there are very obvious limitations, such as the (possibly disastrous) growth of network and processing load on the server once an event takes place in a location that is deemed popular by the community. This latter solution, leads to additional costs in terms of server infrastructure and cannot cope with a highly dynamic world, as the region definition, in terms of server assignment, is relatively static
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