

Meet Improbable, the Startup Building the World's Most Powerful Simulations - julespitt
http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2015/05/27/improbable-startup-simulations/

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rdw
Can anyone explain to me what it actually is? Everything I've read about it is
through this sort of know-nothing journalistic filter.

They often focus on the "kill a monster and it stays dead" angle, so that
seems like a real aspect of the system, but it's not an advance. Other
companies have aimed at this "persistent virtual world-building toolkit"
target before, from Second Life to Blue Mars to Metaverse to Metaplace. What
distinguishes Improbable from these other ideas?

~~~
troymc
Yes, Second Life has one persistent world ("one shard") but it's composed of a
bunch of "sims" glued together at sim boundaries. (A "sim" is a 256 m x 256 m
x notsure m volume of space.) The states of the things in that sim are the
responsibility of one server; if an object crosses a sim boundary, the new sim
may be handled by a different server. The sim-crossing hand-off can cause
object motions to look non-physical.

As I understand it, Improbable also simulates one big world, but they map the
various simulation calculations to servers in a different way. How exactly?
That's their secret sauce.

Philip Rosedale's new startup, High Fidelity, also takes a different approach.
See [https://highfidelity.com/](https://highfidelity.com/)

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ComNik
A bit more information can be found here:
[http://cdixon.org/2015/03/24/improbable-enabling-the-
develop...](http://cdixon.org/2015/03/24/improbable-enabling-the-development-
of-large-scale-simulated-worlds/)

Too me it reads like MapReduce for highly place-dependent computations,
whatever that looks like. Probably something along the lines of a distributed
kd-tree with message passing at borders handled for you as well.

~~~
jpfr
Maybe that's why they showed a flying pirate scenario.

Imagine every object sitting on the same planet (object). Suddenly, everything
interacts with everything. You can't know if the object is a bee gently
landing on a flower, or a 20 mile radius asteroid crashing into earth. The
effect of the latter would be felt everywhere.

So, if every object was sitting on the same planet (object), even their system
would probably crash and burn with n objects passing n^2 messages all the
time.

The kd-tree idea sounds neat. They would need to adapt it however, to allow
objects to move (to pass in and out of other objects' interaction radii).

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Impossible
Improbable's tech intrigues me, but I agree with many of the comments that
technical information on how the actual tech works is limited, and most of the
articles are puff pieces that focus on aspects of Bossa Studio's game that
have nothing to do with Improbable, the part about emergent gameplay for
example. According to Glenn Fiedler (www.gafferongames.com) in his recent GDC
talk on networking physics ([http://gdcvault.com/play/1022195/Physics-for-
Game-Programmer...](http://gdcvault.com/play/1022195/Physics-for-Game-
Programmers-Networking)) this paper by Insomniac Games
([https://d3cw3dd2w32x2b.cloudfront.net/wp-
content/uploads/201...](https://d3cw3dd2w32x2b.cloudfront.net/wp-
content/uploads/2011/06/introductiontosynchost.pdf)) details a system similar
to what Improbable is working on.

In this system the server is basically a distributed database and message
passing system, and grants different clients authority over specific
simulation objects or fields. If a client is the authority it runs the
simulation logic for that object. As long as you can scale you message passing
and db it seems like most work can be offloaded on clients, so complex
simulation is "free". I'd be concerned about cheating in more competitive
games, but it should work well for social or creative games and for non-game
simulation where you know clients are trustworthy.

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dfbrown
I read the entire 5 pages and I have absolutely no idea what this company is
selling

~~~
M8
They are selling good investor-oriented marketing. Reminds me of Palantir.

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joelrunyon
Here's the one-page article -
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2015/05/27/improbable...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2015/05/27/improbable-
startup-simulations/print/)

Splitting this article into 5 pages to increase page views is really sad &
completely unneeded.

~~~
zo1
Does it not at least have the added benefit of giving them the metric of "kept
reading article till page 3, then left". Even if they just infer that there
was something wrong with page 3, rather than the user getting peeved-off that
they have to keep paging to read the rest of the story.

~~~
findjashua
periodically sending the scroll position to the server is a much better
alternative

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cbennett
vapid article but more than that the UI for actually getting through the story
is awful. the recommended articles box above the much smaller 'Continue'
button, is particularly egregious.

~~~
NathanKP
Yeah I'm disappointed in Forbes. Their new website interface is garbage,
practically unusable.

Here is the website of the game itself:
[http://www.bossastudios.com/games/worlds-
adrift/](http://www.bossastudios.com/games/worlds-adrift/)

~~~
cbennett
thanks for that.

I just googled 'Improbable London'. On their website not much substantive ,
just a standard 'hello world' post:
[http://improbable.io/blog/](http://improbable.io/blog/)

I'm personally interested in such an approach for an academic tasks ( complex
electrical simulations), but I have no idea where to find some substantive
discussion of what they're doing here.

kind of sad

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ckluis
Ironic that this talks about modeling games for business and other use cases
when I read [http://www.perworks.com/my-son-has-23-6-billion-how-is-
yours...](http://www.perworks.com/my-son-has-23-6-billion-how-is-yours-doing/)
just a few minutes before on Hackernews. (the link is about building business
models as games letting them loose and using the wisdom of the crowds to make
decisions).

------
nemitek
They have coded a large scale message passing system most likely using the
actor pattern. For examples check out erlang or typesafe's akka.

~~~
troymc
Is that just an educated guess, or do you have a source?

~~~
nemitek
educated guess.

------
troymc
It's worth noting that large-scale simulations are nothing new in the world of
science. For example, consider the EAGLE simulation of the whole universe with
realistic galaxies: [https://www.ljmu.ac.uk/about-us/news/ari-creates-
simulation-...](https://www.ljmu.ac.uk/about-us/news/ari-creates-simulation-
of-the-universe-with-realistic-galaxies)

Improbable seems to be different in that it's aiming at the gaming market? But
apparently they also have science clients? Maybe the difference is in their
computational architecture, or cost?

------
M8
_" The game was also built for a fraction of the usual cost. ... would
typically take years and millions of dollars for a studio of Bossa’s size to
build, but they did it in roughly a year and with just a core team of front-
end developers."_

vs

 _" In their ground floor office on a bland-looking block in Farringdon, a
team of about 60 engineers from MIT, Goldman Sachs and Google sit at $40 desks
writing code..."_

Typical in gamedev :) (e.g. Unity Technologies):

 _" “Eventually we realized the tech we were working on was bigger than the
game,” says Whitehead."_

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Enzolangellotti
They look incredibly nice and skilled though. Too bad I don't possess a useful
skillset nor an outstanding pedigree. Anyway, reporting verbatim their CEO "We
have created a world where there are no server boundaries", so I assume they
managed to scale the instancing method seen in Guild Wars 2 (where overflowing
players are divided among different ghost instances) into a single giant
concurrent world.

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jnoland
Just becasue I learned about Worlds Adrift I'm glad I read this article.

