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LOL, this reminds of an episode of Mythic Quest where the lead engineer (Poppy) imagines "real-time, persistent, globally-reflected environment changes" for the

LOL, this reminds of an episode of Mythic Quest where the lead engineer (Poppy) imagines "real-time, persistent, globally-reflected environment changes" for the MMO they built, gets told that it's unfeasible by the entire dev team, mows ahead anyway and ends up with a disastrous demo at the end when the system basically collapses on itself. Funny how reel-life and real-life collide into each other! :D --- As an aside, after Ted Lasso (which gets all the well-deserved hype), Mythic Quest is a great trope-filled show esp. for anyone who's worked in tech in general (and game dev specifically).

taberiand 5y ago
Sounds vaguely inspired by Ultima Online
danielvaughn 5y ago
I’m a developer, though not in game dev. This sounds feasible, what am I missing?
- Quarrelsome 5y ago
  I'm guessing you'd need Discord level tech to propagate changes in a multiplayer environment which is a bit of a distance from "core competencies".
- noahtallen 5y ago
  A game today which is struggling to accomplish this is Star Citizen, and they did a video on what they plan to do here: https://youtu.be/TSzUWl4r2rU https://youtu.be/TSzUWl4r2rU Anyways, I think the big challenge compared to real time apps like Google docs is that game simulation is significantly more complex than synchronizing bits of text. One problem is that at a minimum, you have the round trip to the server as latency between “submit command” and “receive simulation result”. And this has to happen many times per second so that it looks realistic. And then on the server, it has to be processing the changes from N connected players M times per second, and then simulate what happens in the universe. And if simulation (M) drops too low, you get desync problems where players are rubber-banding and the AI gets very dumb. (An example is that star citizen appears to have great AI in demos, but in the live server, the servers can’t process changes fast enough for the AI to work well.) And then, if you want a lot of connected players or a big universe, this just gets more and more complex, and you’ll eventually out-grow the ability of a single server to process changes. At which point you also need to handled data replication among multiple servers. For example, star citizen game servers don’t have capacity for more planets at the moment, either because of memory or cpu constraints. So sharding the universe into multiple servers is a pre-req for the next stage. So to more directly answer your question, it’s definitely possible to implement. Many games have basic versions working. Minecraft is an example, but it can’t scale to hundreds/thousands of players. New World is another recent example, but even its servers have player caps. No Man’s Sky is sort of an example, but it keeps players spread out so that they rarely encounter each other. Eve Online is also an example, but I think it reduces the amount of nitty-gritty simulation details. (So it might not have a very in-depth physics simulation, or first-person-level details.) So it’s basically a scaling problem, and even then still has limitations based on the speed of light (for internet latency) which limit how good it can get.
  - ludamad 5y ago
    That reminds me of the early work on the internet arguing that the amount of global connectivity wouldn't scale due to power laws. In a way, they were assuming a system like these global world sims. The equivalent of static routing (players that want to play together enter same server) exists, but the "dynamic routing" field is mostly a game of selecting which illusion to present the player (sometimes, it's okay to just stick people on a different instance but make sure their friend group is preferentially on the same one, etc).
  - rowanG077 5y ago
    I'm not sure you understand. Cyberpunk is a single player game.
    - 1123581321 5y ago
      Star Citizen and the fictional MMO in Mythic Quest are multiplayer.
    - noahtallen 5y ago
      I was responding in the context of a grandparent comment, which was talking about features for a fictional MMO which turned out to be infeasible, and then someone asked why they were infeasible
bovermyer 5y ago
I keep forgetting that Mythic Quest exists. I need to watch that.

taberiand 5y ago

Sounds vaguely inspired by Ultima Online

danielvaughn 5y ago

I’m a developer, though not in game dev. This sounds feasible, what am I missing?

Quarrelsome 5y ago
I'm guessing you'd need Discord level tech to propagate changes in a multiplayer environment which is a bit of a distance from "core competencies".
noahtallen 5y ago
A game today which is struggling to accomplish this is Star Citizen, and they did a video on what they plan to do here: https://youtu.be/TSzUWl4r2rU https://youtu.be/TSzUWl4r2rU Anyways, I think the big challenge compared to real time apps like Google docs is that game simulation is significantly more complex than synchronizing bits of text. One problem is that at a minimum, you have the round trip to the server as latency between “submit command” and “receive simulation result”. And this has to happen many times per second so that it looks realistic. And then on the server, it has to be processing the changes from N connected players M times per second, and then simulate what happens in the universe. And if simulation (M) drops too low, you get desync problems where players are rubber-banding and the AI gets very dumb. (An example is that star citizen appears to have great AI in demos, but in the live server, the servers can’t process changes fast enough for the AI to work well.) And then, if you want a lot of connected players or a big universe, this just gets more and more complex, and you’ll eventually out-grow the ability of a single server to process changes. At which point you also need to handled data replication among multiple servers. For example, star citizen game servers don’t have capacity for more planets at the moment, either because of memory or cpu constraints. So sharding the universe into multiple servers is a pre-req for the next stage. So to more directly answer your question, it’s definitely possible to implement. Many games have basic versions working. Minecraft is an example, but it can’t scale to hundreds/thousands of players. New World is another recent example, but even its servers have player caps. No Man’s Sky is sort of an example, but it keeps players spread out so that they rarely encounter each other. Eve Online is also an example, but I think it reduces the amount of nitty-gritty simulation details. (So it might not have a very in-depth physics simulation, or first-person-level details.) So it’s basically a scaling problem, and even then still has limitations based on the speed of light (for internet latency) which limit how good it can get.
- ludamad 5y ago
  That reminds me of the early work on the internet arguing that the amount of global connectivity wouldn't scale due to power laws. In a way, they were assuming a system like these global world sims. The equivalent of static routing (players that want to play together enter same server) exists, but the "dynamic routing" field is mostly a game of selecting which illusion to present the player (sometimes, it's okay to just stick people on a different instance but make sure their friend group is preferentially on the same one, etc).
- rowanG077 5y ago
  I'm not sure you understand. Cyberpunk is a single player game.
  - 1123581321 5y ago
    Star Citizen and the fictional MMO in Mythic Quest are multiplayer.
  - noahtallen 5y ago
    I was responding in the context of a grandparent comment, which was talking about features for a fictional MMO which turned out to be infeasible, and then someone asked why they were infeasible

bovermyer 5y ago

I keep forgetting that Mythic Quest exists. I need to watch that.