Decentralised multi-user online environment

For a peer-to-peer real time network in which network state information and data processing is delegated to user nodes, a discovery index protocol for a first node to determine a subset of nodes deemed relevant to the first node, the discovery index protocol comprising:

• assigning responsibility for sub-regions of a virtual space of the network to selected coordinating peer nodes, each coordinating peer node being responsible for communicating network state updates to nodes active within the respective sub-region, and for receiving network state updates from nodes active within the respective sub-region;
• each node maintaining a network state update connection with a plurality of coordinating peer nodes;
• and
• maintaining a discovery index which records network state update connections of the nodes.

For a peer-to-peer real time network in which network state information and data processing is delegated to user nodes, a semantic filter protocol for limiting communications of a filtering node with each of a plurality of related nodes to data types relevant to each such related node, the semantic filtering protocol comprising:

• determining whether a virtual entity of each other node is concealed from the filtering node in a virtual space of the network, and preventing communications with related nodes having concealed virtual entities;
• assigning to each unconcealed related node a relevance level indicating the relevance of that unconcealed related node to the filtering node;
• and
• constraining communications of the filtering node with each unconcealed related node by an amount corresponding to the relevance level.