Create Previously Impossible Games
improbable.io
improbable.io
Where these group batches P2P or client/server?
My solution to scaling is to only send packets when an action is taken, I will cut up the rotation in pie angles so analogue movement does not spam the server.
Only allows for one-shooters though, no spraying.
Disclosure: not even close to development, just played a couple of hours.
The US East server had ~900 people on it an hour ago, and this isn't a peak time. With that many people, there are two continents open, but usually most of the players are on one continent or the other. Continents are big, and support many separate battles at once (spatially separated, no hard lines). A very big battle may have 200+ players, and with certain exceptions players in it won't need to know anything about players outside that particular battle.
If there are actually 200+ other players near you (within the nominal 300 meter range where updates should be sent), the server won't be sending you data on all at once, just whatever it thinks is the most relevant subset (hence the pop-in). It also breaks the 300-meter default to send data on and for snipers (and probably some other stuff) a bit further out.
I agree that it is quite customised, but at best they might have 5-10 customers in next 2-5 years, so they should be able to support them.
The people paid to create these promotions could build the same shit out of absolutely nothing, completely from scratch. They are all highly experienced and don't need to lean on either platform. It's all a ruse, and perusing projects built with either "engine" (which neither of them are by any stretch of the historical definition) show how much leverage they truly provide developers.
You'd just as easily find that you could hammer a nail with your wallet as you'd find yourself able to quickly build a prototype with either sorry excuse for software.
An apt analogy in the service world is that when I want to write a service, regardless of how many years experience I have, I don't implement my own load balancer. Could I? Yes. Should I? Only if my project is a load balancer.
Build what you need. Buy/ participate in OSS for the rest.
A lot of engine parts are off the shelf solutions for physics, animation, production tools etc,but they are all put together in a specific way for a specific project.
Also if you use 3rd party software in games it creates huge risk, especially when you don’t have access to source code or support is bad.
So in the end of the day a lot things are written from scratch or have an extremely custom integration.
The bigger reason is scope, fun factor and bugs.
Scope is huge, fun might be not there and bugs probably in 100 thousands.
Your criticism is well made.
> MetaWorld, a SpatialOS app being developed by San Francisco-based HelloVR, lets two people play chess in virtual reality together. MetaWorld is also persistent – which seemed like a great idea, until players started throwing virtual chess pieces into the grass, and the Improbable team had to crawl around on their virtual hands and knees to find them.
Either Improbable made it impossible to add a reset button to object positions in their SpatialOS product... or they're hyping their product by showing how much busywork their employees are doing.
Technology isn't the reason that nobody's making hyper-realistic video games, game design is. A lot of new game developers starts out with the idea of "the game where you can do anything", and then slowly learns why other games don't attempt to do that: real life is honestly quite boring and tedious.
I am still not too sure why Improbable just don’t make their own games.
That’s how Epic basically marketed their engine.
This type of games require massive investment of time and resources.
I feel it will be much easier developing your own game vs trying to pursuade studios spend millions of dollars on development, which is inherently risky.
In general it's easier and much less risky to persuade someone else to spend millions of dollars on something than it is to spend millions of dollars on the thing yourself. That's basically what venture capital is, right?
It is really hard sell in gaming world to get paid for engine licence upfront, because developer is only going to make money on launch. So even if you sign somebody you are only going to see this revenue when they launch 2-5 years from signing date.
On top of that gaming ecosystem is very much platform and IP driven. So if I want to distribute MMO on Steam using existent IP, about 50-40% of revenue is gone. If I use Unreal it is another 5%. Then there is marketing, live support. It is super hard to take more from this cake.
It is not the same as selling enterprise software where enterprise already has core business and revenue.
So in Improbable case with 0.5 B raised spending 20m on game should be no brainer. It might be complete waste, but they are going to learn so much more what industry needs and develop much bigger set of tools for this kind of games.
I really like idea of the company, just implementation very much VC driven and they are clearly not experts in the field.
A brief look at Unreal Tournament results in viewing an abandoned project. Working with the engine feels just the same.
I believe this happened with FoundationDB when it got bought by Apple. The bigger companies who were paying for it didn’t lose out too badly, although it’s obviously an inconvenience.
But I would have to say a resounding _yes_.
Action MMOs are the final medium, one day we will all be either living in Mad Max or we will be plugged into one, or both!
Imagine WoW, then PUBG; and extrapolate.
Ferinstance, Chinese players could make a grass mud horse...