Urbi et Orbi: Unusual Design and Implementation Choices for Distributed Virtual Environments

This paper describes Urbi et Orbi, a distributed virtual environment (DVE) project that is being conducted in the Research and Development Laboratory at Epita. Our ultimate goal is to provide support for large scale multi-user virtual worlds on end-user machines. The incremental development of this project led us to take unusual design and implementation decisions that we propose to relate in this paper. Firstly, a general overview of the project is given, along with the initial requirements we wanted to meet. Then, we go on with a description of the system’s architecture. Lastly, we describe and justify the unusual choices we have made in the project’s internals.

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