| Abstract | The majority of the systems and platforms developed
for supporting Distributed Virtual Environments are based on the
concept of distribution from the early beginning of their
development. In this paper we present the migration to a
distributed virtual environment from a traditional client-server
architecture. In particular, this paper describes the case of EVE,
a Networked Virtual Environment originally aimed to support
small-scale applications. EVE started as a standard client-multi
server architecture, which could support multiple concurrent
virtual worlds with a maximum number of seventeen
simultaneous participants in each of these worlds. However, the
need to support larger-scale applications revealed that the
traditional architecture, upon which EVE was based, is
insufficient to meet the needs of these applications, which are
large both in the sense of virtual space and graphics and in regard
to the number of concurrent participants. This paper discusses
the migration of EVE to a distributed platform, which will be
able to support large-scale networked virtual environments. In
particular, the paper describes the modifications realized in the
architectural model of the initial platform for supporting
effectively large-scale applications. The basic entities of the
distributed model are presented, their operations, as well as the
interconnection among them. In addition, the paper presents an
initial approach of the algorithm that will be adopted for the
efficient partitioning of the virtual world and the assignment of
the clients to the entities and resources of the distributed
platform. The approach presented is space-object driven, in the
sense that both the actual size of the virtual space along with the
number of objects with which the user can interact is taken into
account during the partitioning.
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