> One strategy I really like is to think of technologies you couldn't build 5 years ago but are just barely possible today.
Streaming gaming is something I am still laser-focused on. Our networks are only getting faster. I feel there is a gigantic opportunity here that is being passed up by efforts like Stadia.
To do this thing correctly, the game engine itself needs to be developed with these concerns in mind. Expectations of things like having GPUs available on the same machine that is servicing player input events should be eliminated. The simulation itself may benefit from being distributed across multiple nodes connected via a low-latency network.
The future of shard-less, million player MMO worlds will not be feasible if every player's computer will be required to replicate and render all of that game state.
MMO seems to be in decline, not due to technical limitation. Also, I’ve just tried GeForce Now and I was blown away. I don’t think that huge changes in the model are practical in order to get 1% improvement over what’s available now
You can still do things like client-side prediction with streaming, but imagine if you controlled all of the clients and could always trust them. You could have the actual simulation running in a big bunker in Ohio somewhere on entirely synchronous terms (<1ms node-to-node), with a bunch of "player" nodes geo-distributed talking to the shared simulation and operating with CSP.
The game concept itself can be engineered around vertical scale constraints. For instance, imagine flight routes in WoW. If the cost to take a flight was modulated by the system load in the desired target region, you could create a much more seamless way to make this work. Think about real-world flight routes and system demand... The determinism goes down a lot for the technology owner, but the effect is much more compelling to the end customer.
I covered this in my PhD thesis, please check it out and I'd love to hear your thoughts as someone working on this (relatively lonely) problem! https://yousefamar.com/memo/notes/my/phd/
From what you've written so far, while the tech is cool, I'm not sure you're trying to solve a problem that actually exists. This is coming from someone who is bullish on both cloud gaming as well as decentralised architectures for gaming (esp VR) but for other reasons.
You seem to consider updating and rendering millions of players client-side to be a bottleneck; it's not -- human perception bottlenecks kick in long before that. Players can't -- and don't want to -- see all other players that are in the same area. And if they're not, then sharding by area is a much easier solution.
Even if it were a bottleneck, the solution is not to offload that rendering to cloud GPUs, it's many well-established LOD tricks. Game servers don't send millisecond updates of every player in a world to a client, the bandwidth they end up using for good UX is almost always lower than streaming video. You said networks keep getting faster, true, but client GPUs keep getting better and better too. Shard-less horizontal scaling sever-side has already been done btw (see SpatialOS (https://ims.improbable.io/products/spatialos) or WorldQL (https://github.com/WorldQL/mammoth)) or the many proprietary implementations (think Fortnite, Roblox, etc) but I don't think it's as useful as we think it is.
Besides this, I can tell you for a fact that "we have more players than we can handle" is an extremely rare thing actually, even on launch days, even though it might not seem like it to us. The biggest problem for games is getting players in the first place. The ones that do tend to have big budgets to spend on their servers, and it's usually not budgeting that's the bottleneck, but bad planning.
I would be curious to know if you've validated this idea with any studios, and if so, how? Or is the 10-20 hrs mainly focused on building?
Your thesis sounds very interesting. I'll give this a look.
> I'm not sure you're trying to solve a problem that actually exists.
This is more about creating the next generation of problems. I want to enable future experiences that HN would believe are comically-infeasible right now. The greater the disbelief the better.
I do have a very specific game concept and roadmap in mind. I've not talked to any studios or investors yet. I don't intend to until I've published the first game entirely on my own.
The hard part is all the art in a massive world. My current title is constrained to deal with this reality. I'll definitely need outside help on the real deal. Not wasting anyones time until I'm certain it's going to work.
True - you always have to deal with the final frontier. There are still very powerful statistical/hybrid systems that can be employed to mitigate cheaters.
You can combine many factors to close the last mile. Getting privileged information off the client machine is a huge part of the battle. The rest can be dealt with using clever tricks, stats, etc.
For example, imagine a game where you are using this ML aimbot to lock onto players heads. The developer could design a ramping detection system like:
1. Statistical detection - outlier in performance. Begin deeper analysis.
2. Review player inputs using our own ml models to determine likelihood.
3. Escalate to active measures - in-game canaries to bait the aimbot into very unlikely, inhuman responses.
Frankly I think the appetite for socializing online is dying.
If a machine in 5-6 years can leverage AI to render an entire unique universe of AI driven characters why sit in an MMO full of gold farmers, normalized, repetitive meme spammers aka other people who browse the same normalized social media?
Y’all have a good life, but I don’t need to know you all personally, nor did I ask you to solve these “problems” looking to be sold for coin.
> The future of shard-less, million player MMO worlds will not be feasible if every player's computer will be required to replicate and render all of that game state.
I think the problem here isn't render, on that scale you'll have to shard on the server end anyway.
Streaming gaming is something I am still laser-focused on. Our networks are only getting faster. I feel there is a gigantic opportunity here that is being passed up by efforts like Stadia.
To do this thing correctly, the game engine itself needs to be developed with these concerns in mind. Expectations of things like having GPUs available on the same machine that is servicing player input events should be eliminated. The simulation itself may benefit from being distributed across multiple nodes connected via a low-latency network.
The future of shard-less, million player MMO worlds will not be feasible if every player's computer will be required to replicate and render all of that game state.