P2Life: An Infrastructure for Networked Virtual Marketplace Environments
Hauke Coltzau · International Journal of Intelligent Information Processing · 2010
Networked Virtual Environments (NVEs) which are based on Peer-to-Peer technology aim to provide large-scale virtual worlds without bottlenecks coming from centralized instances. Current approaches focus on massively multiplayer online games, but little work has been done on designing NVEs that enable trading goods and services for real money. In this article, the specific threats on such networked virtual marketplace environments (NVMEs) are discussed. Consecutively, requirements for the underlying network structure are derived to avoid them. Finally, an efficient lookup protocol for persistent objects in NVMEs is presented, which can be set on top of distributed hashtables and allows scalable virtual environments of unlimited size.