Comment by sen
5 years ago
Hustling is showing pre-rendered videos to simulate gameplay, or promising an infinite open world and then having a large-but-limited one.
This is flat out lying and saying you're going to build something that massive mega-studios struggle to even build, then throwing in a few dozen promises for stuff that's not even possible with current technology.
>promising an infinite open world and then having a large-but-limited one.
This is also flat out lying, its just that most people will realize its not true. Simulated gameplay that's labelled as "simulated" is fine but if you end up not delivering anything close to that then you'll rightfully lose all credibility.
Scalable simulation worlds are more or less just a networked cluster of nodes with an octree topology. I suppose there are limitations to local node density but other than that providing a seamless experience is more about how to architect the core system than rocket science.
Yes, it's hard. I have no idea if people even want that. Or can you make the node-to-node transit non jarring for players. But I don't really see it as lying. Ambitious certainly.
Can they pull it off? No idea.
I don't think many people expect a literally unlimited world. I'm almost 40 so I don't have enough time to finish most of the non-infinite games I start. I just take issue with his statement that promising literally unlimited content and then delivering a lot of content isn't a lie. I'm not a great programmer (or a pro) and I suck at math so I don't actually know what's possible in terms of infinite worlds.
There have been attempts at delivering more content than a person could play in a lifetime. However, the broader the scope of a game is, the less compelling the content becomes. For example, No Man's Sky is probably the best attempt thus far at a literally infinite world (I don't know if it actually is or not). Its a really great game and I sank about a hundred hours of time into it, but after a while even though you're going to different places it begins to feel too familiar.
The 2nd Elder Scrolls Game, Daggerfall wasn't infinite but it did have 16,000 cities and quests generated in all of them. Supposedly someone figured out it would take about a week to walk from one end of the world to the other but you could actually do it (unless it experienced one of its many crashes while you were attempting it) Its one of my favorite games of all time. While by today's standards the quests were frequently shallow, there was enough hand crafted content to make the overall experience feel pretty authentic.
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What's specifically not possible with current technology?
For example the "infinitely large simulation world" is an off-the-shelf system (or was the last time I looked https://hadean.com/) .
Sure, it might not work in production but that certainly is not a lie.
Hadean is a general-purpose distributed object system. People have tried to use those for games. EvE Aether Wars used that. They got 10K players in the same space. But it's all spaceships in a big space, not interacting much. Xsolla’s Game Carnival was only 500 users.
Spatial OS is more geographical. They have regions, and dynamic boundaries between them. If more players are in a region, the regions get smaller. Inter-region interactions are possible but slower.
Second Life has fixed-sized regions. Each region talks to its neighbors on four sides. The user's viewer talks to all the regions within visual range of the viewpoint. Assets are stored on AWS front-ended by Akamai. The servers are mostly single-thread per region, because the design is old. Crossing regions works most of the time, and since moving to AWS with faster networking, the delay is usually under 0.5 second. The whole system is sluggish but works reasonably well. (I'm writing a new client for it in safe Rust, using Vulkan and multiple threads. It's going well. The existing C++ client gets CPU bound on the main thread and can't keep the GPU busy.)
Disclaimer: I work at Hadean, thought I'd clarify a couple of things
Yes, the Hadean Platform is a general distributed compute platform. But 'EVE: Aether Wars' used Aether Engine, our spatial simulation engine built on top of the platform (and works similarly to how you describe Spatial OS). Some updated numbers: more recently we've hit 2 million entities with a few hundred CCU.
In terms of cross-cell ('cell' being our region) interactions, entities moving between cells has been a single tick (at 15-30Hz depending on sim) in all simulations we've built so far - 'EVE: Aether Wars' did torpedo and player transitions, as well as torpedo target tracking across cells and torpedo-ship collisions. We also have a demo of cross-cell PhysX - this has some pretty strict requirements on inter-cell interaction latency.
Out of curiosity, what would you see as a litmus test for 'simulation with lots of cross-region interactivity'?
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