An interactive 3D world built on a transactional operating system

Multi-player games and interactive 3D worlds are a fast growing market. Traditional server-based implementations struggle with distribution and synchronisation of objects. Typically, sophisticated middleware is used to distribute objects but consistency remains the responsibility of the programmer. Sharing objects within a shared memory is an alternative offering transparent distribution and consistency for all objects. Such a facility is offered by the Plurix operating system developed for PC clusters in which consistency and synchronisation of the shared objects is guaranteed by a novel transaction based consistency model. In this paper we describe the design of our scene graph and an efficient multistage rendering strategy for the visualisation process of an interactive 3D world inside the Plurix system. Measurements demonstrate the advantages of building an interactive world on top of a transactional shared memory system