HERA: Design Framework for Decentralized Distributed Virtual Environments and Games

Distributed Virtual Environments such as Massive Multiplayer Online Games or Virtual Worlds have become very popular in the last few years and a more substantial surge in popularity and use is expected. Because of the huge number of users most of these environments have to cope with scalability problems. The change of the basic infrastructure from a centralized client-server to a decentralized peer-to-peer architecture mitigates these problems. However it makes the handling of management and consistency issues more complicated. To address these issues we have developed HERA - a design framework for decentralized distributed virtual environments. In this paper we present HERA´s Area of Interest handling as well as its consistency provision and introduce a 2D online game application based on the HERA framework.