Sharif Digital Repository

At a first glance, transmitting update information to a geographic region in the virtual space seems to be an attractive primitive in Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming (MMOG) applications where players are constantly moving and need to send updates to their neighbors who are in the same region of the virtual space. The system would become more scalable if entities did not need to keep track of each other or send messages directly to one another. Rather, an entity could just send a message to a specific region in the virtual space (its area of effect), as opposed to sending packets to specific IP addresses, significantly reducing tracking and routing overhead. Fundamentally speaking, update... 

Although collaborative distributed simulations and virtual environments (VE) have been an active area of research in the past few years, they have recently gained even more attention due to the emergence of online gaming, emergency simulation and planning systems, and disaster management applications. Such environments combine graphics, haptics, animations and networking to create interactive multimodal worlds that allows participants to collaborate in real-time. Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming (MMOG), perhaps the most widely deployed practical application of distributed virtual environments, allows players to act together concurrently in a virtual world over the Internet. IP...