Real vs. simulation time

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Real vs. simulation time

Andreas.Raab
Ralph Johnson wrote:
> A related question is what happens if some people have the hardware and
> others do not.  Does an island (teaparty) have to run at the speed of
> the slowest computer in it?  I think so, which means that all the
> participants would have to have the extra hardware or it wouldn't make
> any sense.

Since an island runs in simulation (and not in real!) time all of them
run at the same speed by definition. If one of the machines can't keep
up, the only thing that happens is that you get "outdated" views (e.g.,
from what is real-time past). Which will affect interactivity (since
there will be a lag between an interaction and until the effect is
visible) but nothing else.

This is actually a very important feature of the system which also
relates to what is mentioned in the docs about roundtrip-latency to the
router. The performance (interactivity) of some client is *exclusively*
determined by it's local computational resources plus the router
roundtrip latency.  In other words, no third party will directly[*]
affect the performance of your participant.

[*] It may affect performance indirectly though by contributing to the
computational load (adding an avatar, sending messages) which -for a
malicious client- might include DOS attacks.

Cheers,
   - Andreas