New approaches to big virtual worlds

[animats]

Spatial OS technical discussion. It's a general purpose back end for large world persistent multiplayer games. Games that use it are just starting to come out. So far, not from the big game studios. The games using it have big worlds, but not much in them. 

It's not clear yet how well this will work in practice. As with SL, the world is divided into regions. Unlike SL, the region boundaries move, so that areas with more avatars get smaller regions and more compute power per unit area. There's supposed to be inter-region physics without region crossing lag. That's the kind of system SL needs. Maybe not this one, but as MMO developers use this, we're going to find out a lot more about how to build machinery for big virtual worlds.

There's a good critique by a game developer who uses Spatial OS. There are problems. Some come from it being early stage software, and some lag-related ones are inherent in a client/server VR system. One game studio has already dumped Spatial OS because you have to run on Google's "cloud", and it costs too much.

Game developers are struggling with what to do with all that space. There's a battle royale game, like Fortnite, with 100 square km of play area and 1000 players. So everybody is running around trying to find someone to shoot. There's a big pirate airship world, where users can build airships and islands. A big, tranquil good looking, world called Nostos is in development. One of the strangest ideas is Community Garden. It's a big virtual city in which you can put on VR goggles, plant seeds and water the plants, but not do much else. As in SL, they continue to grow while you're away. It's really just a proof of concept for a persistent world. The Sinespace people are looking at using SpatialOS to scale up their system. What's come out of the Sinespace/Sansar/High Fidelity projects is that, without continents, you're just a game loader, and Steam has the game loader industry sewn up.

There's a lot of activity. Much of this will come out of alpha and beta in 2019.

[Vanity Fair]

Interesting observations, thank you!

I can report that Community Garden has been bought out by another virtual world called Somnium Space:

https://ryanschultz.com/2018/10/29/somnium-space-acquires-community-garden-announces-refund-program-for-metaworld-investors/

[animats]

2 hours ago, Vanity Fair said:

I can report that Community Garden has been bought out by another virtual world called Somnium Space.

Nice. Community Garden was mostly a tech demo. They had a very depressing ad.

Many virtual worlds are starting up. Few have even a hundred concurrent users. Three are cryptocurrency scams. Spinning up a big empty virtual world is becoming a routine operation, but then what? Nobody has it all yet - the visual quality of Sansar, the seamless world of Spatial OS, the content creation tools of SineSpace, and the user numbers of Second Life.

Open-world MMOs with building seem to be the next big thing. Like SL, but with a plot. Mavericks, Nostos, etc. The tech is coming along nicely.

[Vanity Fair]

On 1/27/2019 at 12:08 PM, animats said:

Nice. Community Garden was mostly a tech demo. They had a very depressing ad.

Many virtual worlds are starting up. Few have even a hundred concurrent users. Three are cryptocurrency scams. Spinning up a big empty virtual world is becoming a routine operation, but then what? Nobody has it all yet - the visual quality of Sansar, the seamless world of Spatial OS, the content creation tools of SineSpace, and the user numbers of Second Life.

Open-world MMOs with building seem to be the next big thing. Like SL, but with a plot. Mavericks, Nostos, etc. The tech is coming along nicely.

Thanks for responding! I'd be interested to know more about some of the open-world MMOs you are currently following.

Edited January 28, 2019 by Vanity Fair

[animats]

6 hours ago, Vanity Fair said:

Thanks for responding! I'd be interested to know more about some of the open-world MMOs you are currently following.

I've tried SineSpace and High Fidelity. Like Sansar, they're basically game level loaders - you ask for a level, you wait a minute or two while it loads, and then you can visit. Levels are bigger than SL sims, but go in a straight line for a full minute and you'll hit the edge of the world. Some of the content is pretty, but you can't do much with it. In a SineSpace town, you usually can't open the doors, and most of the rooms are empty. Very few users.

Sominium Space has a new demo video. It shows what your VR world looks like when your funding is US $40,000. The machinery is there, the content isn't. You can see the mountains in the distance, and you could go to them, but there's no reason to.

The lesson is that if LL ever does a new system, they have to bring over the old content and users to get things started. "Build it and they will come" does not work  in this space, unless you have the funding to create AAA-title game assets. LL's asset is the user base.

A new form of griefing - SineSpace has high dynamic range lighting. Somebody put an object in the desert racetrack scene that's so bright the whole screen goes white if you look towards the object.