animats Posted May 19, 2018 Share Posted May 19, 2018 (Caution, theory ahead) OneSim: Scaling Second Life with Kiwano This is a theory paper by a group in France which tried to scale Second Life (the OpenSim variant) to arbitrarily large size. The goal was to allow many avatars to congregate in one area. They got a demo working in 2016. Here's the relevant PhD thesis by Raluca Diaconu from Université Pierre et Marie Curie - Paris. The concept is that you can only see and interact with the N nearest avatars. Doesn't matter how close they are. This prevents the system from choking on crowds. She implemented this by giving each user their own copy of the same sim, while intercepting all the messages in and out of the sim and only passing through updates about the N nearest avatars. She got far enough to demo a meeting room with many people in it, and that was demoed in 2015. But the work does not seem to have been taken any further. While this allows many avatars, it's not clear how it allows a big world. In the demo, each user has their own copy of the entire world, which is too much replication. The thesis suggests copying around copies of entire regions to each user's private sim process, sort of like delivering map tiles to the client in a web based map. The server has all the map tiles, but the browser only has some of them. It's good to know someone is thinking about this. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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