An Approach to Tuning Distributed Virtual Environment Performance by Modifying Terrain

Distributed Virtual Environments (DVEs) must continue to perform well as users are added. However, DVE performance can become sensitive to user behavior in many ways: their actions, their positions, and even the direction that they look. These behavioral elements are important for evaluating virtual terrains. While two terrains may be similar in terms of user experience, task efficiency, immersion, and even aesthetics, they may exhibit substantially different performance out of the DVE when many users are logged in. We discuss an approach - Software Scalability Engineering (SSE) - that uses load simulation and iterative modeling to locate causes of undesirable performance, experiment with changes, and verify improvements to DVE systems. Presented here is a case study of using the approach to substantially improve the CPU requirements of the Torque engine. With a key factor determined, we evaluate several modifications to the original terrain. Finally, a modification is selected for its ability to stabilize the simulation time.