7 ms·

Improbable announces SpatialOS Game Developer alpha

122 points by ggambetta 10y ago

ggambetta 10y ago
All the juicy details in TechCrunch (https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/13/improbable-teams-with-google-opens-spatialos-alpha-for-virtual-world-development/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/13/improbable-teams-with-goog...), VentureBeat (http://venturebeat.com/2016/12/13/google-and-improbable-partner-to-create-massive-online-game-worlds/ http://venturebeat.com/2016/12/13/google-and-improbable-part...), Wired (https://www.wired.com/2016/12/googles-improbable-deal-recreate-real-world-vr/ https://www.wired.com/2016/12/googles-improbable-deal-recrea...), and Google themselves (https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/12/google-partners-with-improbable-to.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/12/google-partners...). Also worth looking at this latest video of Worlds Adrift, one of the games built on SpatialOS, that is now in Alpha: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjLWK6iQvRs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjLWK6iQvRs Beautiful storytelling on this one :) The website (https://spatialos.improbable.io https://spatialos.improbable.io) has more details about the tech itself, and for an even more in-depth look, the documentation (https://spatialos.improbable.io/docs/reference https://spatialos.improbable.io/docs/reference) has everything from a conceptual overview to tutorials to API references.
forrestthewoods 10y ago
The snakiest of snake oils.
- andrewguenther 10y ago
  As someone who knows nothing about Improbable and SpatialOS, would you mind elaborating?
- dang 10y ago
  Please don't post unsubstantive dismissals to HN. It's an anti-pattern here. Substantiated criticisms are fine.
JadeNB 10y ago
I had a terrible time parsing the title (currently "Improbable Partners with Google, and Announces SpatialOS Game Developer Alpha") until I realised that 'Improbable' was the name of the company, and 'Partners' a verb.
- ggambetta 10y ago
  Good point. Fixed!
nodivbyzero 10y ago
It looks like they use GoLang on the server.
- mwitkow 10y ago
  Our Platform team uses Golang extensively. We use it together with gRPC to form our microservice stack that orchestrates the SpatialOS simulations. The TL of our Platform API team did a cool talk at the Go London User Group meetup in October: https://skillsmatter.com/skillscasts/9259-a-debuggable-base-server-by-yifan-zhao-improbable https://skillsmatter.com/skillscasts/9259-a-debuggable-base-...
  - nullstyle 10y ago
    Video doesn't work for me.
    - mwitkow 10y ago
      Seems like an issue with skillsmatter/vimeo :( If you're interested, we also went to CoreOS Fest Berlin this year, where I presented how we dynamically reconfigure our SpatialOS simulations and our Platform microservices: https://youtu.be/zo_Hv0WyNTo?list=PLlh6TqkU8kg_3FpXLlHMnoVqKZysIzXlK https://youtu.be/zo_Hv0WyNTo?list=PLlh6TqkU8kg_3FpXLlHMnoVqK...
  - stcredzero 10y ago
    Very interesting. I have a multiplayer game I'm working on. http://www.emergencevector.com The servers are written in Golang. There is a "Master Control Process" that acts as a coordinator, and a farm of worker processes that can report on their population/load and host star-system instances. (Basically, a game loop on an R-Tree.) The coordinator just uses the best available information and assigns clients to hosts. Clients join hosts in an idempotent fashion, so it doesn't make any difference if an instance currently exists or not. Each process is structured somewhat like a Erlang actor. I might try to do a port of my game on your servers, just out of curiosity.
    - 10y ago
smlacy 10y ago
How is this different from what SecondLife/LindenLabs was doing a decade ago?
- bduerst 10y ago
  I'm not sure what they were doing a decade ago, but this seems to be a more ubiquitous task management system for multiplayer with any game across multiple platforms.
- stcredzero 10y ago
  Linden Labs left things a bit too free-form. What happens when you let people do what they want in a virtual reality? They go up the Maslow Need Hierarchy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs Food, safety, shelter, etc aren't an issue, so they zoom up the needs hierarchy and stop at sex. There needs to be an overarching theme to focus people. Online worlds need to have needs. Otherwise, they can't get too far beyond being a glorified Garry's Mod server. It's like a musical jam session with no structure at all. That kind of thing only works if people already know each other. In public, it's always too chaotic.
- rjfwhite 10y ago
  (disclaimer: I'm a Cofounder & CTO of Improbable - and massive fan of Second Life) You're right to see that there are some inspirations from worlds like Second Life with our platform - it spatially distributed the simulation of the world through multiple servers. Will elaborate on this in a blog post a some point, but some main differences: -SL is a great example of a product somebody could make on top of SpatialOS: we're less of a 'social world environment', and more of an abstract spatial computation platform. We don't care what game engine is used, what the view of the world is, etc. -While really impressive for its time, SL's architecture didn't re-distribute its load across machines based upon player & object density - each server was statically allocated a part of the world. This meant concurrent players per 'Sim' were limited to ~50. We can move these boundaries on the fly to deal with higher density. Here is an example (we really need a better one, this doesn't do it justice!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXhxI4dKU_E&t=1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXhxI4dKU_E&t=1s -Although a player could cross server boundaries, it was never very smooth, and people in SL would deliberately limit their playspaces to a single server. To create a proper seamless world you have to deal with multiple servers simulating the same physical space, and reconciling with each other. Here is an example of us doing this with Unity3D and physics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysB6bi7QUbw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysB6bi7QUbw -Our approach allows for arbitrary kinds of process to be used as the server worker, including existing game engines like Unity3D rather than a monolithic server. https://spatialos.improbable.io/community/create-a-custom-flocking-worker https://spatialos.improbable.io/community/create-a-custom-fl.... We currently have SDKs for C++, C#, Java, rather than the slightly esotetic Linden Scripting Language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linden_Scripting_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linden_Scripting_Language) SL had (incidentally, the first computer language I ever learned!)
TravisCooper 10y ago
Trying to run `spatial update` and keep getting the below msg. Not sure if servers are having issues or what. At 2016-12-13 18:12:58 UTC failed executing command: C:\spatialos\spatial.exe update Internal : Failed retrieving spatial binary. Internal : could not obtain auth token: code = Unauthenticated desc = failed obtaining new refresh token: code = Unknown desc = failed obtaining AuthCode: code = DeadlineExceeded desc = timed out waiting for user
- unlikely-leo 10y ago
  Hi, thanks for doing the tutorial! It looks like you may need to run `spatial init` and then try `spatial update` again? If this doesn't work, please ask your question on https://support.improbable.io/ https://support.improbable.io/ -- there are many more people there to provide support and share ideas.
  - TravisCooper 10y ago
    Thanks for the help! I tried `spatial init` but no dice. I asked the question on the forum you linked. https://support.improbable.io/t/spatial-update-does-not-work-getting-auth-errors/895 https://support.improbable.io/t/spatial-update-does-not-work... Thanks again!
  - themihai 10y ago
    I hope you don't use appengine b/c that looks like an Appengine error.
flipgimble 10y ago
why would I entrust the future of my company or game project to a closed source server and SDK? I've seen several MMO middleware companies announce revolutionary new technology with outdated closed source business models only to fold couple of years layer. Badumna Network suite was the last well funded one I remember closed a while back. And it started by Australian academics with decent technology.
- elcct 10y ago
  There is no open source alternative yet
stcredzero 10y ago
Though different terms are used, both SpatialOS and "Age of Ascent" specifically reference the notion of "Interest Management." That is, not only do the online servers have to simulate the world at the rate of game ticks, the online servers also have to calculate and generate timely updates to interested parties and compensate for lag while seamlessly distributing load across the cluster. The hacks that Eve Online used to somewhat do interest management resulted in metagame "Grid Fu" -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8K18S_RNEQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8K18S_RNEQ 3D worlds are really good for interest management, since distance between objects generally means a drastic lowering of bandwidth required between the objects, even though the objects are still visible to each other. In 2D, such objects have zero bandwidth, but this means there are no "vistas" unless the view zooms out, which makes the player effectively "farther" from the avatar.
paul123456789 10y ago
Hey, I just made a deployment with SpatialOS. This is one of the starter projects. Go to this google doc and click the links. Please leave a comment on the cell as the links are one-time use. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Q185RKFhjspin4zo0PBH7ZRwpoJCf9_f4rywo8-29F4/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Q185RKFhjspin4zo0PBH... Come play!
- unlikely-leo 10y ago
  This guide explains how to build and deploy this game we created as a tutorial: https://spatialos.improbable.io/docs/reference/9.0-alpha/tutorials/helloworld/build-your-world https://spatialos.improbable.io/docs/reference/9.0-alpha/tut... To play the game, just follow the link to the spreadsheet (parent comment) -- no sign-up or tutorial required! :)
pimpflac 10y ago
Great, the scam is now official
buzzybee 10y ago
I've seen this kind of middleware come through several times. It's a hard sell because MMOs are already big productions and this stuff, while technically very challenging, only captures a single bullet point feature: "world is seamless and persistent." And from the player POV, that is cool, but not I'll Buy That cool, especially when scale ends up creating all sorts of other design problems(more players and bigger worlds = more potential for chaos, harder UX).
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

122 points by ggambetta 10y ago

All the juicy details in TechCrunch (https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/13/improbable-teams-with-google-opens-spatialos-alpha-for-virtual-world-development/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/13/improbable-teams-with-goog...), VentureBeat (http://venturebeat.com/2016/12/13/google-and-improbable-partner-to-create-massive-online-game-worlds/ http://venturebeat.com/2016/12/13/google-and-improbable-part...), Wired (https://www.wired.com/2016/12/googles-improbable-deal-recreate-real-world-vr/ https://www.wired.com/2016/12/googles-improbable-deal-recrea...), and Google themselves (https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/12/google-partners-with-improbable-to.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/12/google-partners...). Also worth looking at this latest video of Worlds Adrift, one of the games built on SpatialOS, that is now in Alpha: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjLWK6iQvRs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjLWK6iQvRs Beautiful storytelling on this one :) The website (https://spatialos.improbable.io https://spatialos.improbable.io) has more details about the tech itself, and for an even more in-depth look, the documentation (https://spatialos.improbable.io/docs/reference https://spatialos.improbable.io/docs/reference) has everything from a conceptual overview to tutorials to API references.

forrestthewoods 10y ago

The snakiest of snake oils.

andrewguenther 10y ago
As someone who knows nothing about Improbable and SpatialOS, would you mind elaborating?
dang 10y ago
Please don't post unsubstantive dismissals to HN. It's an anti-pattern here. Substantiated criticisms are fine.

JadeNB 10y ago

I had a terrible time parsing the title (currently "Improbable Partners with Google, and Announces SpatialOS Game Developer Alpha") until I realised that 'Improbable' was the name of the company, and 'Partners' a verb.

ggambetta 10y ago
Good point. Fixed!

nodivbyzero 10y ago

It looks like they use GoLang on the server.

mwitkow 10y ago
Our Platform team uses Golang extensively. We use it together with gRPC to form our microservice stack that orchestrates the SpatialOS simulations. The TL of our Platform API team did a cool talk at the Go London User Group meetup in October: https://skillsmatter.com/skillscasts/9259-a-debuggable-base-server-by-yifan-zhao-improbable https://skillsmatter.com/skillscasts/9259-a-debuggable-base-...
- nullstyle 10y ago
  Video doesn't work for me.
  - mwitkow 10y ago
    Seems like an issue with skillsmatter/vimeo :( If you're interested, we also went to CoreOS Fest Berlin this year, where I presented how we dynamically reconfigure our SpatialOS simulations and our Platform microservices: https://youtu.be/zo_Hv0WyNTo?list=PLlh6TqkU8kg_3FpXLlHMnoVqKZysIzXlK https://youtu.be/zo_Hv0WyNTo?list=PLlh6TqkU8kg_3FpXLlHMnoVqK...
- stcredzero 10y ago
  Very interesting. I have a multiplayer game I'm working on. http://www.emergencevector.com The servers are written in Golang. There is a "Master Control Process" that acts as a coordinator, and a farm of worker processes that can report on their population/load and host star-system instances. (Basically, a game loop on an R-Tree.) The coordinator just uses the best available information and assigns clients to hosts. Clients join hosts in an idempotent fashion, so it doesn't make any difference if an instance currently exists or not. Each process is structured somewhat like a Erlang actor. I might try to do a port of my game on your servers, just out of curiosity.
  - 10y ago

smlacy 10y ago

How is this different from what SecondLife/LindenLabs was doing a decade ago?

bduerst 10y ago
I'm not sure what they were doing a decade ago, but this seems to be a more ubiquitous task management system for multiplayer with any game across multiple platforms.
stcredzero 10y ago
Linden Labs left things a bit too free-form. What happens when you let people do what they want in a virtual reality? They go up the Maslow Need Hierarchy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs Food, safety, shelter, etc aren't an issue, so they zoom up the needs hierarchy and stop at sex. There needs to be an overarching theme to focus people. Online worlds need to have needs. Otherwise, they can't get too far beyond being a glorified Garry's Mod server. It's like a musical jam session with no structure at all. That kind of thing only works if people already know each other. In public, it's always too chaotic.
rjfwhite 10y ago
(disclaimer: I'm a Cofounder & CTO of Improbable - and massive fan of Second Life) You're right to see that there are some inspirations from worlds like Second Life with our platform - it spatially distributed the simulation of the world through multiple servers. Will elaborate on this in a blog post a some point, but some main differences: -SL is a great example of a product somebody could make on top of SpatialOS: we're less of a 'social world environment', and more of an abstract spatial computation platform. We don't care what game engine is used, what the view of the world is, etc. -While really impressive for its time, SL's architecture didn't re-distribute its load across machines based upon player & object density - each server was statically allocated a part of the world. This meant concurrent players per 'Sim' were limited to ~50. We can move these boundaries on the fly to deal with higher density. Here is an example (we really need a better one, this doesn't do it justice!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXhxI4dKU_E&t=1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXhxI4dKU_E&t=1s -Although a player could cross server boundaries, it was never very smooth, and people in SL would deliberately limit their playspaces to a single server. To create a proper seamless world you have to deal with multiple servers simulating the same physical space, and reconciling with each other. Here is an example of us doing this with Unity3D and physics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysB6bi7QUbw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysB6bi7QUbw -Our approach allows for arbitrary kinds of process to be used as the server worker, including existing game engines like Unity3D rather than a monolithic server. https://spatialos.improbable.io/community/create-a-custom-flocking-worker https://spatialos.improbable.io/community/create-a-custom-fl.... We currently have SDKs for C++, C#, Java, rather than the slightly esotetic Linden Scripting Language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linden_Scripting_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linden_Scripting_Language) SL had (incidentally, the first computer language I ever learned!)

TravisCooper 10y ago

Trying to run `spatial update` and keep getting the below msg. Not sure if servers are having issues or what. At 2016-12-13 18:12:58 UTC failed executing command: C:\spatialos\spatial.exe update Internal : Failed retrieving spatial binary. Internal : could not obtain auth token: code = Unauthenticated desc = failed obtaining new refresh token: code = Unknown desc = failed obtaining AuthCode: code = DeadlineExceeded desc = timed out waiting for user

unlikely-leo 10y ago
Hi, thanks for doing the tutorial! It looks like you may need to run `spatial init` and then try `spatial update` again? If this doesn't work, please ask your question on https://support.improbable.io/ https://support.improbable.io/ -- there are many more people there to provide support and share ideas.
- TravisCooper 10y ago
  Thanks for the help! I tried `spatial init` but no dice. I asked the question on the forum you linked. https://support.improbable.io/t/spatial-update-does-not-work-getting-auth-errors/895 https://support.improbable.io/t/spatial-update-does-not-work... Thanks again!
- themihai 10y ago
  I hope you don't use appengine b/c that looks like an Appengine error.

flipgimble 10y ago

why would I entrust the future of my company or game project to a closed source server and SDK? I've seen several MMO middleware companies announce revolutionary new technology with outdated closed source business models only to fold couple of years layer. Badumna Network suite was the last well funded one I remember closed a while back. And it started by Australian academics with decent technology.

elcct 10y ago
There is no open source alternative yet

stcredzero 10y ago

Though different terms are used, both SpatialOS and "Age of Ascent" specifically reference the notion of "Interest Management." That is, not only do the online servers have to simulate the world at the rate of game ticks, the online servers also have to calculate and generate timely updates to interested parties and compensate for lag while seamlessly distributing load across the cluster. The hacks that Eve Online used to somewhat do interest management resulted in metagame "Grid Fu" -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8K18S_RNEQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8K18S_RNEQ 3D worlds are really good for interest management, since distance between objects generally means a drastic lowering of bandwidth required between the objects, even though the objects are still visible to each other. In 2D, such objects have zero bandwidth, but this means there are no "vistas" unless the view zooms out, which makes the player effectively "farther" from the avatar.

paul123456789 10y ago

Hey, I just made a deployment with SpatialOS. This is one of the starter projects. Go to this google doc and click the links. Please leave a comment on the cell as the links are one-time use. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Q185RKFhjspin4zo0PBH7ZRwpoJCf9_f4rywo8-29F4/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Q185RKFhjspin4zo0PBH... Come play!

unlikely-leo 10y ago
This guide explains how to build and deploy this game we created as a tutorial: https://spatialos.improbable.io/docs/reference/9.0-alpha/tutorials/helloworld/build-your-world https://spatialos.improbable.io/docs/reference/9.0-alpha/tut... To play the game, just follow the link to the spreadsheet (parent comment) -- no sign-up or tutorial required! :)

pimpflac 10y ago

Great, the scam is now official

buzzybee 10y ago

I've seen this kind of middleware come through several times. It's a hard sell because MMOs are already big productions and this stuff, while technically very challenging, only captures a single bullet point feature: "world is seamless and persistent." And from the player POV, that is cool, but not I'll Buy That cool, especially when scale ends up creating all sorts of other design problems(more players and bigger worlds = more potential for chaos, harder UX).

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]