
Create Previously Impossible Games - ColinWright
https://improbable.io/
======
failrate
Um, I was a developer on PlanetSide 2, and we had zones that supported over a
thousand concurrent players. It remains a problem only of having experienced
developers analyzing the problem and iterating on solutions until you've
reached your target. Not only is there no magic bullet, there's no secret
sauce, either. Proximity systems are key to scaling. If you have two player
characters who are within a given range of each other, they will be grouped
together into a batch of clients that share updates with each other. Clients
on a conventional arena shooter all share updates with each other each network
timeslice. But for MMOs, these update groups are dynamic.

~~~
bullen
What do you mean by "zones"? 1000 players sending to all other 1000 players?

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.

~~~
chupasaurus
Planetside 2 has (it's still active?!) a borderless map of continent with
players' actions sended by server to clients based on range AFAIK.

Disclosure: not even close to development, just played a couple of hours.

~~~
failrate
Yes, that is accurate.

~~~
bullen
Ok, but how, with square grid neighbors?

~~~
NS39K
If there's a square grid in that process for Planetside 2, it'd have to be for
coarse culling, not anything final. The game is pretty precise about ranging
this stuff, if not always responsive (pop-in can be pretty bad in dense
fights).

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.

------
banachtarski
I can’t describe how little I trust this company’s software for an actual
production system. There is so much nonsense in the marketing of this product
with very little in the way of a technical whitepaper explaining how things
work. Backends for MMO type software typically are highly specialized
depending on the game itself and it would not surprise me in the slightest if
this was all overfunded vaporware

~~~
Justsignedup
Remember the Unlimited Detail tech demo? While that looked cool I still don't
see those techniques in use in any way a decade later.

Your criticism is well made.

~~~
stev0lution
Well, point cloud renderers are a real thing. There are open source libraries
that let you explore millions of points in your browser:
[http://potree.org/](http://potree.org/). I even saw a demo
([http://nurulize.com/](http://nurulize.com/)) showcasing animations but I
think the main problem with point clouds is that there is no good solution for
physics/lighting yet.

------
Jasper_
I was recently contacted by someone looking to hire me to Improbable. They
linked this puff piece which made its way into Wired, and I had a chuckle:
[http://www.wired.co.uk/article/improbable-quest-to-build-
the...](http://www.wired.co.uk/article/improbable-quest-to-build-the-matrix)

> 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.

~~~
Asooka
The only time I've seen "the game where you can do anything" work out is VR
Chat. But that's only because "anything" here means "anything you can make in
Unity and publish to the servers", so it's less a game and more a multiplayer
creative experience.

------
timavr
It is very nice video.

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.

~~~
taneq
> 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?

~~~
timavr
Well you need to have huge marketing and support for B2B. And then B has to
actually make money for you to get anything.

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.

------
thisacctforreal
The title feels a bit clickbait, perhaps "Create multiplayer games with
unprecedented scale" might be an improvement.

------
ris
Doesn't seem like it would be a _great_ business decision to bind the core of
your game to a proprietary cloud service.

~~~
danpalmer
There are often agreements put in place for situations like this, where the
source code and instructions for running it would be put in escrow so that
should the company go under or disappear in some way, their client would be
able to carry on running the service in some form.

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.

------
RobLach
If you want to sell a game engine, sell a game first.

------
matte_black
Are previously impossible games necessarily better games?

~~~
bullen
I'm biased by sunk cost
([http://fuse.rupy.se/about.html](http://fuse.rupy.se/about.html)) and skeptic
of SpatialOS (which looks like a pile of garbage on top of netty/akka).

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.

~~~
matte_black
The problem with MMOs is that there’s so many people though.

~~~
bullen
People are fun, specially if you remove their ability to be mean:
[https://store.steampowered.com/app/486310/Meadow/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/486310/Meadow/)

~~~
al2o3cr
If you think that's "removed their ability to be mean" you're not thinking
hard enough.

Ferinstance, Chinese players could make a grass mud horse...

