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An Epic future for SPJ
- losvedir 5y agoWow! Didn't see that coming, but very interesting. When he says "the metaverse", does he mean Epic is working on one of their own? Or is it the one facebook is working on, and they have some sort of partnership?
- YetAnotherNick 5y agoI think Epic is working on VR games, and saying metaverse is more cooler.
- gpm 5y agoEpic has been talking about the metaverse for years... e.g. it came up a lot in their Apple lawsuit, and searching on google turns this up from mid 2019: https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1157841800385695744 https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/115784180038569574... So far it seems like they sort of vaguely want to turn Fortnite into it... but I haven't really seen much that I would call concrete.
- Barrin92 5y ago>So far it seems like they sort of vaguely want to turn Fortnite into it... but I haven't really seen much that I would call concrete. I always thought their Travis Scott event was a pretty good example of something you could call early metaverse-ish, going beyond the usual scope of the game https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYeFAlVC8qU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYeFAlVC8qU
- cma 5y agoSince at least 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xG9-6k3RYIU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xG9-6k3RYIU Slide 46 and on (mentioned on 48) is largely metaverse and a bunch of stuff presaging the Apple lawsuit, even though Fortnite hadn't launched yet: https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/apps/steamdevdays/slides2016/FutureOfVRAndPCGames.pdf https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/apps/steamdevdays/slides2...
- theptip 5y agoWhen you say “the one FB is working on” - the stated goal is for there to be one Metaverse, as there is one Internet. Of course that requires protocol interop (as did the Internet with TCP/IP and HTTP) and who knows if it will happen for the Metaverse.
- kibwen 5y agoMetaverses are less fundamental than the internet, and there's no need for there to be exactly one of them (other than lucrative proprietary lock-in, anyway). Metaverses are application-level concerns, and will be built on top of the existing internet infrastructure. In the same way that a web browser is a portal to HTTP content, a metaverse application will be a portal to whatever application-level protocols arise to support them.
- wmf 5y agoMetaverses are application-level concerns I'm pretty sure that's not how they see it. I think the vision is of the singular Metaverse as the new narrow waist upon which all future apps are built.
- kibwen 5y agoYes, and that's why it's an application level concern. A metaverse like they envision is a platform for the discovery of applications created according to certain standards, just like a web browser, and just like an app store. It's in every big player's interest to delude you into believing that there's only going to be one metaverse, and in particular that it's going to be theirs, but we have no more reason to believe these claims than we have reason to believe that there will ever be exactly one software platform in any other context. It's just a VR-focused app platform.
- dagmx 5y agoHave either Tim Sweeney or Mark Zuckerberg said that there's plans for only a single metaverse? I think it's been pretty clear that they're going to work on their own metaverse products. Epic seems to build on Fortnite , while Meta have Horizon. I don't believe either have stated compatibility as a goal.
- glennpratt 5y agoSeems pretty clear companies are talking about "the metaverse" as broad concept. https://tech.fb.com/connect-2021-our-vision-for-the-metaverse/ https://tech.fb.com/connect-2021-our-vision-for-the-metavers... https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/announcing-a-1-billion-funding-round-to-support-epics-long-term-vision-for-the-metaverse https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/announcing-a-1-bil... https://www.matthewball.vc/about https://www.matthewball.vc/about
- tweedledee 5y agoA huge loss to and a massive vote of no confidence in MSR Cambridge. Is Epic worse than Facebook? I can’t imagine much of an upside to praying on human frailties in order to make games addictive to extract money from kids.
- ksec 5y ago>Is Epic worse than Facebook? I can’t imagine much of an upside to praying on human frailties in order to make games addictive to extract money from kids. What?
- Mikeb85 5y agoProbably a reference to the fact that Epic makes a ton of money from Fortnite.
- ksec 5y agoBut Fortnite is a not a pay to win game. Unless All Games are "praying on human frailties". Not only that, Epic invested every single dollar they made from Fortnite back to improving Unreal Engine.
- tsimionescu 5y agoPay to win or not is irrelevant. Advertising and game design technicques to encourage vulnerable people to spend inordinate amounts of time and money on a game are the real problem. This leads to the current situation of most hugely successful games today, where the vast majority of players spend nothing or next to it, while a small minority of "whales" literally spend thousands of dollars monthly.
- Mikeb85 5y agoDidn't say I agreed. But there's an argument to be made that by making the game addictive, keeping players in the game encourages them to spend money on skins and whatever else they sell. I'm personally pro-entertainment, pro-culture, etc... Tons of things we spend money on in life is entertainment and frankly, useless. But it's fun.
- FuckedCompany 5y agoMetaverse? Really? Holy hypeverses Batman
- dochtman 5y agoAnyone know more information about Verse itself?
- friedman23 5y agoI wonder what the new language is going to look like, one thing I'm interested in is declarative programming languages. I feel like a declarative programming language would actually be a pretty good fit for games.
- sk0g 5y agoSorry for the later reply, but Epic bought Skookum, the company behind SkookumScript [0]. They have showed off usages of it in Fortnite [1] too, and it looks pretty interesting, if a bit wacky to current programmers. Assuming he's there to push SkookumScript/ Verse over the line for UE5's release and beyond, this would be a good preview of the final work. [0] https://skookumscript.com/about/look/ https://skookumscript.com/about/look/ [1] https://twitter.com/nephasto/status/1340046706642186247 https://twitter.com/nephasto/status/1340046706642186247
- brightly-salty 5y agoI'd suspect based on SPJ's previous comments that it would be a strict statically-typed pure functional language but it probably depends on what amount of control he has on fun/research vs utility to Epic.
- willvarfar 5y agoI always remember SPJ’s chart in a short jokey video “Haskell is useless” https://youtu.be/iSmkqocn0oQ https://youtu.be/iSmkqocn0oQ Really made me see things clearer.
- eklavya 5y agoIt’s funny in my mind that I laughed at his joke about “the computer would just produce heat” and somehow the whole of cryptocurrency is literally doing just that.
- Mikeb85 5y agoGood video, never seen it before. Thanks! Also love the fact he doesn't take himself or programming things too seriously (Haskell in useless category is great).
- ksec 5y agoI really like his chart about usefulness and Unsafe programming. And that was in 2011! We have seen in the past 10 years how programming moving in the direction he was pointing at.
- graffitici 5y agoI guess Rust is a language that went the move to Safe and Useful, following the top arrow?
- amelius 5y agoIt lacks a GC however, which Haskell has for a reason.
- WJW 5y agoRust prevents a few types of unsafety, mostly relating to memory and concurrency. There are many more on which Rust does not do particularly well though. Specifically, Rust allows arbitrary side effects from basically any part of the code. You can always write to stdout or a logfile, or open up new sockets, or delete files from the filesystem and there will be nothing in the type signature to even warn you about this.
- Jare 5y agoA long time coming since Tim Sweeney's 2005 talk referred to functional concepts and things like STM https://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/edu/seminare/2005/advanced-fp/docs/sweeny.pdf https://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/edu/seminare/2005/advanced...
- servytor 5y agoTim Sweeney did a presentation[0] at MIT's CSAIL on programming languages that I thought was really interesting (it mentions Haskell quite a bit), titled "The Next Mainstream Programming Language: A Game Developer’s Perspective." [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20120113030236/http://groups.csail.mit.edu/cag/crg/papers/sweeney06games.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20120113030236/http://groups.csa...
- seanmcdirmid 5y agoHe wrote an article on I think gamespy of the same variety. Back in 2000 nonetheless, it really influenced the direction I took in grad school: https://m.slashdot.org/story/9565 https://m.slashdot.org/story/9565 (the actual article seems to be lost, maybe I can dredge up a web archive link).
- kreetx 5y agoRecently listened to the Haskell Interlude podcast with Lennart Augustson where he mentions in the end that he's at Epic Games. Looks like they are investing greatly in Haskell-like things now. [1] https://haskell.foundation/podcast/2/ https://haskell.foundation/podcast/2/
- zemo 5y agoOn slide 57 he takes the following position: Memory model – Garbage collection should be the only option an interesting position to see Sweeney take up, since so many people in games reflexively say that garbage collection is totally non-viable whenever it comes up. but he also says: By 2009, game developers will face... CPU’s with: –20+ cores MacBook Pros, Razer Blades, the XBox Series X, and the PS5 all use 8-core CPUs, so the prediction of an ever-escalating number of CPU cores seems to have not really panned out. One thing that has been majorly outside of these predictions is the dedicated ML chips like the M1's Neural Engine. The presentation isn't explicitly dated, but since the sample game is Gears of War, which came out in 2006, later on he says "by 2009" as if it was not-yet 2009, and the file name is "sweeney06games.pdf", gonna say this is almost certainly a presentation given in 2006. At the time this was given, the iPhone hadn't even come out yet. It's an interesting presentation. I wonder what Sweeney would say today about this presentation, about how much of it still rings true, and about which things he would second-guess nowadays.
- armchairhacker 5y agoMight be similar to and looks like it's going to replace https://skookumscript.com https://skookumscript.com
- bangonkeyboard 5y agoAn early look at Verse syntax: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/840713360?t=01h06m24s https://www.twitch.tv/videos/840713360?t=01h06m24s
- atarian 5y agoTimestamp?
- polio 5y agoIt's in the query param: 01h06m24s
- dharmaturtle 5y agoCurrentRound^ : int = 0 for (i = 1..NumberOfRounds): CurrentRound := i if(!SetupPlayersAndSpawnPoints()?): ShutdownGame() return else: Players.PutAllInStasisAllowEmotes() ResetMatch() Looks nonfunctional as heck to me. Also it isn't expression-based - at least that's what the bare `return` says to me. Honestly just looks like a dialect of Python. I wonder what SPJ will do with it...
- runevault 5y agoWhat is SPJ supposed to bring to this? Are they gonna throw a top end type system onto it or something? Nothing about this looks interesting at first blush.
- __s 5y agoPreviously he only announced leaving MSR two months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28473733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28473733
- exdsq 5y ago> I also expect to work with Dan Piponi on data-centre-scale transactional memory This sounds really interesting, I learned about STM in Haskell while working on Cardano & it seemed so obvious - I am sure there will be some seminal outcomes of this too.
- DethNinja 5y agoIt is pure speculation but I don’t believe Epic’s Verse language will be a functional programming language. Verse is more intended for Blueprint people and there is no way people working on the Blueprint code will be able to move into functional programming. Also I don’t get the investment into Verse language itself, why not just fund LuaJit, do we really need another scripting language when LUA nailed some many things right? I guess Epic will craft a pretty fast scripting language and try to lock game developers to their own ecosystem.
- rowanG077 5y agoHonestly Lua is a horrible, terrible language. It's only gotten so widespread because it's trivial to embed.
- dllthomas 5y agoI don't know, Simon has been big on "spreadsheets as functional programming" for a bit. Something blueprinty built with that point of view might be both "functional" and approachable.
- ksec 5y ago>Simon has been big on "spreadsheets as functional programming" Thanks for the keyword quote. Interesting topic as I felt Spreadsheet is very under-represented form of programming. Especially when trillions of dollars relies on Excel to function properly.
- dllthomas 5y agoHe's got some interesting talks on the topic, and sometimes the slides aren't in comic sans!
- pjmlp 5y agoVisual languages can be quite functional, specially when they map into IC like modules.
- WoahNoun 5y ago
- bmitc 5y agoSounds like Epic is hiring some pretty epic people. From the article, Dan Piponi works there as Principal Mathematician. As far as titles go, that's a dream one. I've really enjoyed some of Dan Piponi's writing and blog posts.
- agumonkey 5y agoI wonder how fast the cutural view of haskell will shift now. Lots of young minds will be exposed to haskell/purefp with a very exciting and positive light, meaning they'll probably sip all of it without questionning it. Pretty good but maybe a little bad too.
- thewakalix 5y agoWhat are you talking about?
- agumonkey 5y agoHaskell is still niche, but if the gaming community gets wind of that thing Epic is using for their systems, they might get interested in a vastly different way people are looking at haskell and pure fp right now. This might bring a new (and vast) crowd, and a crowd that might come with an apriori appreciation of haskell (because of the Epic brand trust), this often causes a religious view on whatever idea is learned.
- thewakalix 5y agoWhat programming language is Epic currently using? Do people have a religious view about that language?
- tsimionescu 5y agoI don't think you should assume SPJ was brought in to transition Epic to Haskell.
- shrimpx 5y agoBizarre move. AFAIK he does whatever he wants at MSR. Maybe he's sick of that environment's politics; maybe he's sick of academic research/the ICFP crowd and wants to work on "real world" stuff. I can't imagine it's about money.
- mightybyte 5y agoNever underestimate the capacity of poor management for screwing things up.
- nickkell 5y agoI would’ve also assumed his job was perfect, but he’s the best judge of that! This is basically what Erik Meijer did isn’t it? He worked at Microsoft and produced some really nice things that had a big impact, like reactive extensions for example.
- shrimpx 5y agoYeah. Simon Marlow also left MSR years ago, for Facebook.
- twic 5y agoMSR is having pretty substantial layoffs at the moment. Some kind of substantial reorientation, with whole projects being shut down.
- nextos 5y agoYes, AFAIK they are setting up a major lab in Amsterdam on molecule design using deep generative models.
- tome 5y agoSee, for example, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/podcast/machine-learning-molecular-simulation-and-the-opportunity-for-societal-good-with-chris-bishop-and-max-welling/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/podcast/machine-lea...
- zepto 5y agoMuch as I am suspicious of Epic, this kind of move is way better than their silly stunt with the App Store. The way to beat Apple is to develop better technology than them. It will take billions of dollars to do this, but Epic has the money.
- Shorn 5y agoIt may be worth noting that Steve Lucco[1] also left MS recently, after a stint of about 20 years. [1] self-described co-designer of Typescript - https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-lucco-b5084958/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-lucco-b5084958/
- pkpioneer 5y agoNew antitrust suit from Phhhoto alleges Facebook copied and killed the competition: https://pkpioneer.blogspot.com/2021/11/new-antitrust-suit-from-phhhoto-alleges.html https://pkpioneer.blogspot.com/2021/11/new-antitrust-suit-fr...