Kiwano: Scaling virtual worlds
Raluca Diaconu, Joaquın Keller · 2016
Kiwano is a distributed system that enables an unlimited number of avatars interact in the same virtual space. By separating the management of virtual world components -avatars, moving objects from the static décor- we take a novel approach and introduce a neighborhood relation between avatars. In Kiwano we employ Delaunay triangulations to provide each avatar with a constant number of neighbors independently of their density or distribution. The avatar-to-avatar interactions and related computations are then bounded, allowing the system to scale. The optimal number of avatars per CPU and the scalability of our system have been evaluated simulating tens of thousands of avatars connecting to an open Kiwano instance deployed across several data centers, in the cloud. These results exceed by orders of magnitude the performances of current state-of-the-art.