Behaviour-based multiplayer collaborative interaction management

A collaborative virtual environment (CVE) allows geographically dispersed users to interact with each other and objects in a common virtual environment via network connections. One of the successful applications of CVE is multiplayer on-line role-playing game. To support massive interactions among virtual entities in a large-scale CVE and maintain consistent status of the interaction among users with the constraint of limited network bandwidth, an efficient collaborative interaction management method is required. In this paper, we propose a behaviour-based interaction management framework for supporting multiplayer role-playing CVE applications. It incorporates a two-tiered architecture which includes high-level role behaviour-based interaction management and low-level message routing. In the high level, interaction management is achieved by enabling interactions based on collaborative behaviour definitions. In the low level, message routing controls interactions according to the run-time status of the interactive entities. Collaborative Behaviour Description Language is designed as a scripting interface for application developers to define collaborative behaviours of interactive entities and simulation logics/game rules in a CVE. We demonstrate and evaluate the performance of the proposed framework through a prototype system and simulations. Copyright (C) 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.