An Innovative Design Approach to Build Virtual Environment Systems

Abstract

A Virtual Environment (VE) presents a complex problem with interesting non-trivial challenges for software development. The majority of existing systems supporting VE are based on monolithic architectures, making maintenance and software reuse difficult at best. When a novel concept or idea requires implementation, it is not possible to extend an existing system by replacing or incrementing the necessary functionality. This leads to a proliferation of VE systems. This paper identifies some of the major problems in the current development trend of VE systems that result in incremental innovation with little overall progress. However, component methodology and other software engineering principles are not widely employed in system design. We present the Java Adaptive Dynamic Environment (JADE) as an innovative design approach to building VE systems. The paper discusses some of the major elements of the JADE component framework, such as the kernel, the namespace, the event model and how to configuration takes place. In addition, a simple maze dungeon game is discussed demonstrating the runtime reconfiguration of the supporting VE system.