Improbable, Spatial OS, and all that.

[animats]

Out in the big world, there's a startup called Improbable which sells something called Spatial OS. This is a back-end system for big multiplayer worlds. They raised $500 million and paid 150 developers for several years, to, well, fix region crossings. Their region boundaries move, so that if players congregate in an area, it's divided into smaller regions so more servers can be applied to the area. Everything is supposed to be seamless no matter how big it gets.

They're having a big flap right now, involving the big players: Unity, Epic, and Google, over how open this will be. Worth following if you're into game industry issues. Initially, Spatial OS was very closed; you have to use their servers for at least part of your system. Google's servers, actually. Big game companies didn't like that model. Now they're opening it up a bit. Unity had a disagreement with Improbable, and in response, Improbable cut a deal with Epic.

Right now, we can choose between big-world and slow (SL), and little-world and fast (Sansar, Sinespace, etc.). The technology to eliminate that distinction is coming, and fast. 2019 is going to be interesting.

[Paul Hexem]

And none of that technology will be incorporated into SL anyway.

Freakin' platform still doesn't even support multithreading, and the servers apparently still don't take advantage of any VM technology either.