Using a virtual machine inside of a game?

I am in the design stage of making a 3d "robot programming" game. Inspired by games such as Colobot, Robot Odyssey, Cholo, etc.

I want every robot in the game to have it's own isolated environment/operating system/virtual machine just as they would in real life. Each environment should be sandboxed so that it is local to the robot in terms of how it in开发者_开发知识库teracts with the rest of the game.

Originally I was going to implement the HACK VM as described in the book "Elements of Computing Systems", but then got curious as to whether there is a better solution in terms of performance for this style of game.

So my question is: Is there a virtual machine architecture already existing that would serve my purpose well?

P.s. The language and game engine to be used has not been decided yet, but will probably be either C# or smalltalk.

Hmm.. using a separate image per robot is a bit of overkill IMO. I don't know the requirements of your project, but why just don't run all robots in same image using own Process? (You must know that smalltalk supports green threading model).

About HydraVM: originally it was a proof of concept project. Surprisingly it is worked well and quite stable. But for further development you need a projects which really require such architecture. And frankly, smalltalk language-level infrastracture was not ready for it at that moment (i wouldn't say that it is ready today ;) Because to leverage that, you need a better tools like remote debugging, remote browsing, remote image management etc etc.

I am really surprised to hear that you were able to run 11 images in parallel. That's awesome. Since i never tried to run more than 2 :) The problem with such many images, that you need a different memory management system. And one which used in Hydra is inherited from Squeak VM and are not really fits with such design.