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.
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?