Evolution of scalability with synchronized state in virtual environments

Developing scalable software architectures to suit virtual environment applications has been a challenge even in face of extraordinary advancements in computing and bandwidth power. In virtual environments, modifications to the world must be broadcasted across all clients, creating a network and processing complexity on the server-side that grows at an O(N
²
) rate. Therefore, scalability will always be hard to obtain for any virtual environment architecture. In order to achieve scalability, modern virtual environment architectures make several assumptions about user distribution, update frequency, and read and write operation in the environment. Such constraints can greatly increase scalability, but the cost is often ignored from developers, creating undesirable restrictions on how users should behave and what functionalities they may expect. We approach modern architecture constraints with a critical view of the implicit impositions that are made, compare the end results and performance of their deployment, and suggest new directions away from foundational and mostly unquestioned assumptions about virtual environment architectures.