Gaming
Podcast Summary: Tackling Game-Scaling Challenges
Explore how new technologies revolutionise MMOs, enabling massive player counts and rich, dynamic worlds. Insights from industry leaders.
August 7, 2024
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9
mins read
Linda Wang
VP Marketing
Key takeaways:
In a recent X Space session, Rashid Mansoor, founder and CEO of MetaGravity, joined James Hursthouse from Aethir to discuss the future of gaming, the metaverse, and the critical role of decentralised computing. The discussion unveiled a vision of a digital future that promises to revolutionise how we play games, interact with virtual worlds, and understand our reality.
The conversation happened after MetaGravity and Aethir, a pioneer in DePIN, announced a groundbreaking partnership. This collaboration aims to revolutionise online gaming by combining MetaGravity's HyperScale Engine with Aethir's decentralised computing network. The joint goal is to overcome longstanding limitations in multiplayer gaming, enabling massive, seamless virtual worlds that could redefine the future of the 3D internet.
For decades, the gaming industry has grappled with a fundamental limitation: the ability to create truly massive, seamless virtual worlds. With a background in electrical engineering and applied mathematics, Rashid Mansoor has long been fascinated by this challenge. He explains:
"Games have thus far evolved under the pressure of the technology constraints and in many ways push the boundaries, but games are high-performance real-time simulations. As a result of that and the technology pressures introduced by multiplayer, game sessions have always been constrained by this limit where you can have tens, maybe a hundred players or modestly beyond a hundred, depending on the fidelity of your game."
This limitation has forced game designers to work around technical constraints, leading to the familiar concepts of instancing, zoning, and sharding in MMOs. While these solutions have allowed for the creation of vast virtual worlds, they've always been a compromise, breaking the illusion of a truly persistent, seamless universe.
James Hursthouse adds context to this challenge:
"MMO players are all too familiar with the frustration of being separated from friends on different servers or building multiple iterations of the same city just to play together. These limitations have been a persistent challenge in creating truly seamless, shared virtual worlds."
MetaGravity's mission is to shatter these longstanding limitations. Mansoor elaborates:
"What MetaGravity is doing is figuring out how to overcome that limit. That limit really comes from one place. If you have a game simulation today, like a battleground, it must be instanced and run on a single server."
The company's HyperScale Engine aims to distribute game simulations across multiple servers while maintaining a single, seamless reality for players. This breakthrough could enable game mechanics that have been impossible until now, such as truly open-world warfare or player-built cities that can organically grow to support hundreds of thousands of inhabitants.
Mansoor elaborates on the potential and flexibility:
"Unlike previous approaches to scaling, locked into existing cloud providers, we are not. We can have a homebrew cluster of nodes that we can run on. And that also meant that when Aethir appeared with the technology they've been building, it was easy for us to start deploying and testing on their infrastructure."
To showcase the potential of the HyperScale technology, MetaGravity is developing "Edge of Chaos," an ambitious MMORPG that embodies the vision of a living, breathing virtual world. Mansoor describes it as:
"A low-fantasy simulation, where you could enter the world as a peasant and work your way up, or invest a little bit up front in properties and so on, and enter the world as a lord, or whatever you like. But the idea is that you have a real opportunity to build wealth in this world, and when transacting, you're part of a real player-driven economy, where the players craft everything in the world."
Many game developers dream of this level of freedom and persistence, but technical limitations have always prevented it. With MetaGravity's technology, games like Edge of Chaos could finally deliver on the promise of truly player-driven virtual worlds. But a key question remains. How can such in-game economies emerge?
The move towards decentralised computing infrastructure is critical in realising this vision. James Hursthouse explains the advantages:
"The benefit of decentralised nodes is that the distance between a user and the node is minimised. And because of that, as our network grows, and as we get more and more nodes into our network, we can provide a more latency-free experience for users."
But beyond this purely technological edge, there is a far more significant benefit of decentralised compute. Its main advantage in large-scale gaming is that it enables genuine economies to develop within the game. This is only achievable with both decentralisation and the ability to scale arbitrarily. The importance of arbitrary scaling is that it eliminates design restrictions, granting players more freedom and control. This leads to organic self-organisation, resulting in socio-political structures that support player-driven economies.
The role of decentralisation is equally vital, Mansoor explains:
“Decentralisation is crucial because it represents another form of freedom. Currently, game economies are tightly controlled by third parties, much like an authoritarian government. These economies depend on the decisions of corporations, which often do not align with the players' interests. Today’s gaming worlds require trust and permission, both of which hinder full adoption and the true transfer of value within virtual economies.”
Only a trustless and permissionless decentralised approach could help realise MetaGravity’s vision of a more open, accessible metaverse. Mansoor emphasises:
"It is important that this third generation of the internet is more decentralised than what we saw with the second generation. Because this third generation is about building authentic virtual communities and economies, and this aligns with our vision that the future must be distributed and decentralised across the planet.”
Hursthouse adds to this point, highlighting the importance of community in the Web3 space:
"We have a very vibrant community around, something as simple, in some ways, as a cloud computing platform. So, as MetaGravity and its other game partners come to market, we can do many exciting things, like joint airdropping. And our community of Aethirians will get early access to some of these game experiences."
However, the future of large-scale gaming looks even more fascinating when we consider AI’s role.
The visionaries also touched on the exciting potential of AI in creating more immersive and dynamic virtual worlds. Mansoor envisions:
"For a thousand players, you probably want to populate the world with 10,000 AI NPCs, but not like the NPCs you see in a game like World of Warcraft, where they stand around waiting for something to happen. But rather AI agents with their own sense of agency."
This integration of advanced AI could not only enhance gameplay but also contribute to the development of more sophisticated AI systems. Mansoor suggests that games like Edge of Chaos could serve as training grounds for next-generation AI, leveraging the distributed computing power of networks like Aethir's:
"We would use that huge globally distributed network of GPU nodes to serve as the brains for training these AIs. There's the potential to build a game that's fun to play and brings large numbers of players into its world. This would create the experiences and data you need to train the next generation of strategic thinking AI."
While MetaGravity's immediate focus is on gaming, the technology's potential applications extend far beyond entertainment. Mansoor hints at future possibilities:
"The future is very much smart cities with intelligence, with simulation, predicting what will happen ahead of time. Governments will make policies based on simulation of even mundane things like a transport network and how to optimise it. Or we may even see modelling for catastrophe or risk for insurance purposes."
From urban planning to scientific research, the ability to create massive, detailed simulations could revolutionise how we understand and interact with the world around us. Mansoor shares his long-term vision:
"What's been a lifelong goal for me is to compute nature. Because if we can compute nature, we can predict and understand it. And if we can predict and understand it, then we can do extraordinary things."
Hursthouse echoes this sentiment, highlighting the broader implications of decentralised computing:
"This decentralised cloud future is essential for genuine industrial simulation, solving the last mile problem and enabling real-time, bidirectional IoT data flow. This infrastructure must be ubiquitous, fully redundant, and capable of affecting real-world systems in real time. It's not just a hope, but an obligation to make this technology available everywhere worldwide."
Towards the end of Rashid Mansoor and James Hursthouse's conversation, listeners glimpsed into a compelling future. A future where the lines between the physical and digital worlds blur, massive virtual economies thrive, and how we understand reality itself might be transformed through the power of simulation.
MetaGravity's work is more than just advancements in gaming technology. It is a fundamental shift in how we interact with digital spaces and each other. As Mansoor puts it:
"For decades, MMOs have been facades of virtual worlds, with canned stories that lose their magic once you peek behind the curtain. With Edge of Chaos, we're building a truly living, breathing world where there is no 'Wizard of Oz' - it's all real behind the scenes. To achieve this, we've had to overcome fundamental technological challenges in scalability, creating the HyperScale Engine and MetaGravity to make the impossible possible."
This vision of persistent, player-driven virtual worlds is no longer a distant dream. With the combined efforts of companies like MetaGravity and Aethir and the power of decentralised computing, we stand on the brink of a new era in digital experiences.
The journey ahead is full of challenges but also full of potential. As we move towards this hyperscale, decentralised future, we're not just changing how we play games or interact online. We're potentially reshaping our understanding of community, economy, and even reality.
The metaverse is coming and promises to be more expansive, immersive, and transformative than we ever imagined. With MetaGravity leading the charge, the future of digital experiences looks brighter and bigger than ever. So, come build it with us!
Join the MetaGravity HyperScale Alpha playtests. Here, gamers and the public can be the first to experience the future of hyperscale online multiplayer gaming.
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