5 ms·

I was just out of high school then. I seriously thought we'd have great VR in 20 years. Maybe 15 years later I checkout out Second Life. Kind of basic, but sti

I was just out of high school then. I seriously thought we'd have great VR in 20 years. Maybe 15 years later I checkout out Second Life. Kind of basic, but still seemed like the plan was on track. Over a decade later VR games seemed to imply a near-future result we had all be hoping for. But now it seems that the idea can't robustly scale till the internet is something stronger. Like, we can't yet have Fortnite that's 3000 players. Could we create a system that intelligently applies one stylistic theme to all resolutions. To not aim for one visual experience, but ensure the scope. You could be in any size of space with any number of users, but the complexity of textures would depend on local storage and bandwidth. So it looks low-res on a mobile connection, but super 4k with all the files local and a super fast connection. Every resolution has a managed outcome. Like Minecraft view. Just fantasizing. Not an engineer.

cookie_monsta 4y ago
> I seriously thought we'd have great VR in 20 years. I wonder if there is an episode about self-driving cars
usea 4y ago
Rendering things (~textures) already happens entirely locally. It has never been any other way. Also, intelligently rendering things at different resolutions in different scenarios is ancient technology at this point [0]. Roughly speaking, the only thing that's happening over the internet in a multiplayer game is communicating information about players such as location and discrete actions performed. Small numbers about the state of the game, not graphics or textures or anything like that. When you move, the 2999 other players need to know where you moved to, or where you are now. This has to happen many times per second to create a believable simulation. Even just sharing things like "I moved 2 inches in this direction in the last 30ms" or "I pulled the trigger of my gun when pointing at this angle" between 3000 participants is extremely challenging. It is heavily affected by the particulars of the game design, too. A turn-based game has to communicate a lot less often. Games that can guarantee no interactions between certain segments of players can reduce the information as well. Many game designs require that all players have up-to-date information at all times, or that things don't happen out of order. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_detail_(computer_graphics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_detail_(computer_grap...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- majormajor 4y ago
  I read Carlo Rovelli's book The Order of Time about time, relativity, etc. One of the striking things - that I couldn't fully follow, frankly - was something along the lines of there's a limited cone of spacetime for which you can even tell what relative order things happen in. That there's not a valid concept of "simultaneity" for places far, far, far apart due to speed of light, time dilation, whatnot. So: just design a game where your players are so far apart that the speed of light is the mechanism that guarantees no interactions between some players. ;) But more relevantly, this seems to be one of those problems that's been hampered by the slowing of single-core performance. Though disk and memory and network keep getting faster, so I wonder what the absolute limit if a game really focused on processing single state globally above all else would be. Maybe even at high bandwidth the latency to thousands of players wouldn't be good enough to get all the updates out?
  - Scaevolus 4y ago
    > just design a game where your players are so far apart that the speed of light is the mechanism that guarantees no interactions between some players. ;) EVE Online :)
    - lifeisstillgood 4y ago
      Honestly it's one thing that almost convinced me the universe is really a version of the Matrix - like an ant farm running in some alien bedroom.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  For a single person in VR, you can track 6 positions, 3 with orientations too, using about 36 bytes. Add some more state and let's say 50 bytes per update. If you update the hundred most visible people at 60fps, and the rest at 10fps, then you could have 3000 people walking around the same area with about 14Mbps of bandwidth. That's quite doable! Gunplay adds more data for bullets but also you probably don't need such detailed positioning, and you can get away with sending the positions of only the nearby players and bullets.
NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
>Like, we can't yet have Fortnite that's 3000 players. Interestingly EVE online (the only true MMORPG in IMHO) can have player battles that large. Typically they get TimeDilation™ applied, which means that the game actually slows down so the server can handle it on a given node. However, this would be utterly vomit inducing for VR. That said, the main trade hub (Jita) always has about a thousand players on it at any given time. Though the vast majority of those will probably be docked, there can easily be a few hundred in system at once actively flying around. I think a few hundred player VR game is plausible with today's tech.
- cwillu 4y ago
  Planetside 2 routinely does a couple hundred in a big fight, and recently did a server test putting a bit over a thousand in a single fight. A continent (an approximately 1km-radius circular collection of regions that you will itself (approximately a 1km radius circle subdivided into regions to capture) will regularly have a thousand people on it.
  - NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
    I might have to check this out.
    - cwillu 4y ago
      https://www.planetside2.com/news/world-record-breaking-pts-event https://www.planetside2.com/news/world-record-breaking-pts-e...
lordnacho 4y ago
I'm not sure the issue is technical, I think it might be business. Doesn't seem to be that there's a non niche use case for it. If you take the actual words Virtual Reality and think about it, we already have that. Alternative worlds where you do stuff like fight monsters. The social element of that is already well served with traditional screens, and you don't really need to be able to be in it 3D for it to be engaging, because other people have engaged us since the beginning of time. Specific worlds like WoW or EVE are also popular because they're specific, one is fantasy, the other is sci fi. An unspecific world that kind of just looks like reality, what is it even? Who will go there? Something like surgery that is on all the Meta adverts, maybe. I'm not a surgeon so I can't tell for sure, but it would seem to me that an already high value activity like that has already found all the educational materials it needs to let surgeons learn and practice their craft. A VR version world be nifty but how much is the value added over whatever surgeons are currently doing? So it might come but it will come because it gets cheaper due to general investment, not because the doctors really need it.
yummypaint 4y ago
Check out planetside 2, it's a fully mature game that effectively pulls this off. Thousands of people on a single massive map with individual bullets simulated as physics objects. Not sure about mobile connections, though, ping is fundamentally important.

cookie_monsta 4y ago

> I seriously thought we'd have great VR in 20 years. I wonder if there is an episode about self-driving cars

usea 4y ago

Rendering things (~textures) already happens entirely locally. It has never been any other way. Also, intelligently rendering things at different resolutions in different scenarios is ancient technology at this point [0]. Roughly speaking, the only thing that's happening over the internet in a multiplayer game is communicating information about players such as location and discrete actions performed. Small numbers about the state of the game, not graphics or textures or anything like that. When you move, the 2999 other players need to know where you moved to, or where you are now. This has to happen many times per second to create a believable simulation. Even just sharing things like "I moved 2 inches in this direction in the last 30ms" or "I pulled the trigger of my gun when pointing at this angle" between 3000 participants is extremely challenging. It is heavily affected by the particulars of the game design, too. A turn-based game has to communicate a lot less often. Games that can guarantee no interactions between certain segments of players can reduce the information as well. Many game designs require that all players have up-to-date information at all times, or that things don't happen out of order. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_detail_(computer_graphics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_detail_(computer_grap...

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
majormajor 4y ago
I read Carlo Rovelli's book The Order of Time about time, relativity, etc. One of the striking things - that I couldn't fully follow, frankly - was something along the lines of there's a limited cone of spacetime for which you can even tell what relative order things happen in. That there's not a valid concept of "simultaneity" for places far, far, far apart due to speed of light, time dilation, whatnot. So: just design a game where your players are so far apart that the speed of light is the mechanism that guarantees no interactions between some players. ;) But more relevantly, this seems to be one of those problems that's been hampered by the slowing of single-core performance. Though disk and memory and network keep getting faster, so I wonder what the absolute limit if a game really focused on processing single state globally above all else would be. Maybe even at high bandwidth the latency to thousands of players wouldn't be good enough to get all the updates out?
- Scaevolus 4y ago
  > just design a game where your players are so far apart that the speed of light is the mechanism that guarantees no interactions between some players. ;) EVE Online :)
  - lifeisstillgood 4y ago
    Honestly it's one thing that almost convinced me the universe is really a version of the Matrix - like an ant farm running in some alien bedroom.
Dylan16807 4y ago
For a single person in VR, you can track 6 positions, 3 with orientations too, using about 36 bytes. Add some more state and let's say 50 bytes per update. If you update the hundred most visible people at 60fps, and the rest at 10fps, then you could have 3000 people walking around the same area with about 14Mbps of bandwidth. That's quite doable! Gunplay adds more data for bullets but also you probably don't need such detailed positioning, and you can get away with sending the positions of only the nearby players and bullets.

NaturalPhallacy 4y ago

>Like, we can't yet have Fortnite that's 3000 players. Interestingly EVE online (the only true MMORPG in IMHO) can have player battles that large. Typically they get TimeDilation™ applied, which means that the game actually slows down so the server can handle it on a given node. However, this would be utterly vomit inducing for VR. That said, the main trade hub (Jita) always has about a thousand players on it at any given time. Though the vast majority of those will probably be docked, there can easily be a few hundred in system at once actively flying around. I think a few hundred player VR game is plausible with today's tech.

cwillu 4y ago
Planetside 2 routinely does a couple hundred in a big fight, and recently did a server test putting a bit over a thousand in a single fight. A continent (an approximately 1km-radius circular collection of regions that you will itself (approximately a 1km radius circle subdivided into regions to capture) will regularly have a thousand people on it.
- NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
  I might have to check this out.
  - cwillu 4y ago
    https://www.planetside2.com/news/world-record-breaking-pts-event https://www.planetside2.com/news/world-record-breaking-pts-e...

lordnacho 4y ago

I'm not sure the issue is technical, I think it might be business. Doesn't seem to be that there's a non niche use case for it. If you take the actual words Virtual Reality and think about it, we already have that. Alternative worlds where you do stuff like fight monsters. The social element of that is already well served with traditional screens, and you don't really need to be able to be in it 3D for it to be engaging, because other people have engaged us since the beginning of time. Specific worlds like WoW or EVE are also popular because they're specific, one is fantasy, the other is sci fi. An unspecific world that kind of just looks like reality, what is it even? Who will go there? Something like surgery that is on all the Meta adverts, maybe. I'm not a surgeon so I can't tell for sure, but it would seem to me that an already high value activity like that has already found all the educational materials it needs to let surgeons learn and practice their craft. A VR version world be nifty but how much is the value added over whatever surgeons are currently doing? So it might come but it will come because it gets cheaper due to general investment, not because the doctors really need it.

yummypaint 4y ago

Check out planetside 2, it's a fully mature game that effectively pulls this off. Thousands of people on a single massive map with individual bullets simulated as physics objects. Not sure about mobile connections, though, ping is fundamentally important.