Abstract—The majority of the systems and platforms developed for supporting Distributed Virtual Environments are based on the concept of distribution from the early beginning of their development. In this paper we present the migration to a distributed virtual environment from a traditional client-server architecture. In particular, this paper describes the case of EVE, a Networked Virtual Environment originally aimed to support small-scale applications. EVE started as a standard client-multi server architecture, which could support multiple concurrent virtual worlds with a maximum number of seventeen simultaneous participants in each of these worlds. However, the need to support larger-scale applications revealed that the traditional architecture, upon which EVE was based, is insufficient to meet the needs of these applications, which are large both in the sense of virtual space and graphics and in regard

Distributed Virtual Environment (DVE) systems have been designed last years as a set of distributed servers. These systems allow a large number of remote users to share a single 3D virtual scene. In order to provide quality of service in a DVE system, clients should be properly assigned to servers taking into account system throughput and system latency. The latter one is composed of both network and computational delays. This highly complex problem is known as the quality of service (QoS) problem. In this paper, we study the implementation of a genetic algorithm (GA) for solving the QoS problem in DVE systems. Performance evaluation results show that, due to its ability of both finding good search paths and keeping diversity, this nature inspired technique can provide significantly better solutions than other heuristic methods while requiring shorter execution times. Therefore, the proposed implementation of GA search method can actually improve the QoS offered by DVE systems.