
London-based Improbable unveils SpatialOS for distributed simulation - ggambetta
http://www.alphr.com/technology/1001967/improbable-the-british-tech-startup-with-massive-ambition
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yeureka
I am a bit sceptical about this startup.

Two friends interviewed there and both weren't impressed.

One of them is the best developer I know, with decades of cutting edge AAA
games engine development experience, including in the MMO space and his words
were: "they have no clue about games development and don't have much more than
vapourware"

I hope he is wrong though and that the company is successful. They seem to be
one of the few games related companies to compete with finance on compensation
packages in London.

~~~
bnjm
Interesting, did he mention any specifics? They seem to be aiming to create a
general platform that's not specific to games. They also do have a few
marketing / business managers which might be why it sounded like vapourware?
As far as I can tell they have a lot of talent in the engineering department.

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roymurdock
Sounds more like Virtual Software/Infrastructure as a Service than a
conventional OS:

 _Unsurprisingly, working in SpatialOS will require special skills. Games can
still be built with the Unity engine, though they 'll also need to be able to
work with Scala, the native SpatialOS language. However, Narula said the
World's Adrift team needed "very little" training. From there, it's simply
"pushed" out onto Improbable's infrastructure, and congratulations, you're a
maker of worlds._

Cost Structure:

 _Narula wouldn 't reveal pricing, but you only pay for usage – if no one is
in your world, there's no cost – and he suggested Bossa's ability to build
Worlds Adrift shows it's affordable._

If I'm understanding this correctly, it's more that they're building large,
persistent "environments" that can easily integrate with existing development
and modeling software. Virtual sandboxes for playing and testing.

Anyone have enough info to provide clarification?

~~~
k33n
> need to be able to work with Scala

This kills the startup.

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kumarm
Are you suggesting not supporting a language thats not in top 25 languages
today is their #1 problem?

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inspectahdeck
I think he's suggesting that only supporting a language thats not in top 25
languages today is their #1 problem

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tsurkoprt
Nothing new under the sun - this sounds just like Ab Initio Co>OS
([https://www.abinitio.com](https://www.abinitio.com) started somewhere in
1995 and I would say the best piece of software code I've seen in my 20 years
- not working for them anymore, so it is not advertisement).

~~~
david-given
Well, I had a look at their website.

It takes twenty seconds to load. (I timed it.) And all that delay is
deliberate; it's stupid animations and scrolly things, all of them
unskippable. Once it's loaded you now have a different stupid scrolly thing
which is almost impossible to navig...

Oh god. It's flash. The whole site is one huge flash page! What is this, the
1990s?

If their marketing and PR department is so utterly out-of-touch that they
think this is a good idea, I shudder to think what the engineering's like!

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lucaspiller
Gamasutra has a more gaming focussed article on it:
[http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/256015/Improbable_How_a_t...](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/256015/Improbable_How_a_team_of_15_builds_a_physicsbased_MMO.php)

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devit
MMORPG backend as a service?

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JackFr
Better summary than TFA

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modeless
So... it's Second Life as a service.

~~~
oscargrouch
best TL;DR

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mhroth
The hype all sounds well and good, but it seems to be what they're really
offering is an opportunity to do "large scale" monte-carlo simulations. Which
is also a great thing, but the results of said simulations will only be as
good as the detail to which they are modeled.

The example that they give about utilities modeling usage in a city is great,
but someone is going to spend a whole lot of time modeling the details of the
city, and constantly verifying that those results match up with the real
world.

I spent a lot of time doing these kinds of simulations in school...

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c0g
From an chat with one of their employees, my understanding is that they have a
nice SDK to make it easy for people to write simulations thay scale well, by
enforcing some constraints:

Dependencies between agents are local and can be expressed by simple messages

Low dimensional and smooth action space

Simple per-agent dynamics

From what I've heard it isn't going to revolutionise anything, but it might
make more massive open world space MMORPGs which I'm strongly in favour of.

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nemitek
First time I saw a post about these guys I said that they're just using the
actor pattern...now I hear that they use Scala...another point for actors!

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jackgavigan
I'm surprised that none of the companies in this space are applying this sort
of technology to simulating financial markets.

~~~
robotresearcher
The point of this project/company is that the agents are spatially embedded.
Markets are almost abstracted from their physical layout (with the exception
of high-frequency stuff where the speed of light breaks the abstraction).

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howeman
Is there technical information on this somewhere? How is this different from
AWS and from a traditional supercomputer? If I write a shared-memory parallel
computation could I just run it on their platform (assuming I've done the work
to make sure it can scale), or do I need to use MPI/a special language to make
it all work?

~~~
ggambetta
There's more information on the website: [http://improbable.io/learn-
more](http://improbable.io/learn-more)

