Infinite Fun Space
Large scale virtual worlds can require vast amounts of data both
to describe their shape and appearance and to fill them with
interesting content. This data must typically be authored by
artists and programmers, placing great demands on time and space
to create and store it. At runtime, the data must be loaded,
sorted through and filtered to present the user with a
compelling experience that does not overwhelm the computing and
rendering resources available. Distributed systems, such as
massively multi-player on-line games, have the additional
bottleneck of needing to fetch the data from remote servers.
Infinite Fun Space explores a number of techniques for
enabling large scale virtual worlds including on-the-fly
procedural generation of the world and its content, hierarchical
level-of-detail management of the world data, and plausible
emulation of object behaviors through event-based
simulation.
- minimize per-frame tests through predictive, deferred
event-based object simulation
- use plausible emulation of low priority behaviors to
eliminate events
- compute n-body interaction between objects of
widely varying sizes using the hierarchy of nested offset
grids
- on-the-fly, context sensitive procedural terrain
generation
- efficient terrain tessellation
Steven C. Dollins
Last modified: Wed May 28 11:32:47 PDT 2003