Sharing In-Memory Game States

Massively multi-user virtual environments (MMVEs)are becoming increasingly popular with millions of users. Typically, commercial implementations rely on client/server architectures for managing the game state and use message passing mechanisms to communicate state changes to the clients. We have developed the Typed Grid Object Sharing (TGOS)service providing data sharing of in-memory data. TGOS aims at simplifying the development of MMVEs by sharing scene graphs in a peer-to-peer way and also data of backend services. Replication is controlled by different consistency models, including restartable transactions combined with optimistic synchronization for strong consistency. In this paper we describe the data centric architecture of the Wissenheim Worlds application and relevant parts of TGOS. Furthermore, we present an evaluation showing the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed approach.