Aussies Using P2P for new Virtual World

Filed under: Virtual Worlds — mike @ 11:13 am

Robert Scoble reports that an Australian company is working on a new Second Life competitor called “Outback Online” that replaces centrally-hosted servers with P2P technology to provide better graphics and more scalable islands. You can sign-up on their website for an Alpha version they plan to release this summer.

I’m a strong believer in the use of P2P for scaling virtual worlds. Broadband has taken us a long way, but (at least for the foreseeable future) our network speeds will continuously trail behind the latest demands in computer graphics. Like video files, 3D assets tend to be large in size, and P2P is ideal for transferring large files around. Virtual worlds will continue to become more detailed and realistic over time, and that detail will require larger and larger files.

In the context of virtual worlds, an island server can also act as a P2P tracker for all the assets that make up that island: landscapes, buildings, avatars, etc. The server itself has a copy of these assets and acts as a seed in case no other clients are contributing to the swarm. The more visitors on the island, the better performing the swarm becomes. This performance improvement helps alleviates the fact that your client needs to shuffle more data around (more avatars, position information, etc.).

A P2P architecture also helps alleviate the demands on the island server itself. Just having to deliver all these assets is a very expensive process both in terms of bandwidth and server utilization. Moving much of that work to clients means that the server has more capacity available for more important things like physics, transactions, and keeping track of all the visitors who are logged-in.

I’m happy to learn of another company entering the market. Second Life needs more competitors to keep them innovating. I’m looking forward to the advances Outback Online will bring to the community, and hopeful that P2P will lead the way for more scalable virtual world platforms.