From: Jayson Raymond Subject: APPS: Distributed Simulation (was Game Design) Date: Wed, 11 Mar 92 04:21:11 PDT In several previous message autodesk!robertj@uunet.uu.net (Young Rob Jellinghaus) and brucec@phoebus.labs.tek.com (Bruce Cohen) addressed the difficulties of wide-area shared cyberspaces. Simnet, Darpa's distributed networked 300 vehicle simulator could be considered just such a system. The problem of reducing network traffic and latency are handled currently by utilizing dead reckoning to extrapolate the current vehicle and component motion vectors. By maintaining a model at both the agents node as well as at the nodes of the potential viewers, the potential viewers can then display the vehicles, and as the agent veers from the extrapolation by some margin, an update is sent out over the net (that's my understanding, though not my focal area). This system works well for the rather static world of existing Simnet - with the only dynamic objects being vehicles and special effects. Yet this does not allow the environment, (terrain, buildings etc.) to be modified in real-time. The next generation systems will require these types of objects to be dynamic and thus research is currently proceeding with how to distribute this information to each node on the net. Brian Blau of UCF-IST, for example, spoke briefly on this list of the research they are doing in this area some months back. -- Jayson Jayson Raymond BBN Advanced Simulation