Improving Content Download Performance in Online Virtual Worlds

摘要

Virtual worlds differ from other online game services by providing features and services that allow users to create their own unique graphical 3D content to dynamically modify the virtual world. These features place significant demands on servers, clients, and the network. As virtual worlds evolve to support more users, interactions and higher-resolution graphics these demands will continue to increase. This paper describes an experimental implementation of a user-generated content download/cache management technique. This technique was tested against a commercial virtual world service and demonstrated effective in reducing network load without introducing additional inefficiencies. This work has shown it is possible to reduce the network demands of user-generated content on virtual world services entirely through a more efficient loading scheme without increasing the speed of graphical or network processing hardware or bandwidth.