Technology

Reddit /r/MMORPG AMA with Raph Koster

"We are partners with several folks on the technology side: AWS, Didimo for avatars, Okteto for backend stuff, etc. No publishers yet."

"We still render the game on your local client. We are not pixel streaming like GeForce Now or Stadia. So client perf will still have dependencies on your local hardware.

But we do the heavy lifting for a lot of the game using cloud-based hardware. Running the full scale world sim locally would be a big ask for many computers."

Question: Can you please give an overview of the data and networking architecture and technology so that we can understand what's possible from a practical perspective of scale, community, and "discovery" gameplay experience.

You've mentioned that things will be discovered- and I wonder how this may get around our inhibit data mining meta. Additionally, I'm curious about the metaversal infrastructure, and how it relates to different players.

Answer: We have posted some of this in blogs on the Playable Worlds website. Think of it this way, which is *inaccurate* but a good mental model:

• a single server process handles a zone (not really, but go with me here)
• you can bubble it up or shut it down based on traffic
• you hyperlink between them to build a galaxy
• each manages its own persistence
• central DB manages global state for things that travel between them
• assets stream down to clients like they do on the web, and go into cache like on the web, and we can clear the cache or cap it, like the web, and don't need to patch to deliver them
• most all gameplay is in softcode on the server, so we can update it on the fly

Reddit /r/MMORPG Stars Reach Living World Video & Steam Page are out!

RE: Stars Reach adopting Unity:

"The story with Unity versus Unreal is actually much more complicated than that.

Unreal is just a more monolithic engine. If you want to replace one part, a lot of other parts start getting pulled out too. It’s more expensive to mod it into something different. Among those things that you need to do for an MMO is replace the networking, which in Unreal’s case also often means chunks of the physics and the animation system, because Unreal’s networking model is based on high frequency network replication. Unreal is actually hardcoded at one byte’s worth of index for player counts. Its server model is too heavy for cloud usage, too, costs too much to run. Which is why the MMOs that use it run custom backends entirely, and replace the networking system. We also run a custom backend, of course, but are able to leverage more of Unity’s networking in the process.

We started with Unreal, actually, and ended up having to switch because of the development costs and being a relatively small shop."

RE: The number of possibilities of reactions within Stars Reach, Raph Koster elaborated upon this in an MMORPG.com discussion:

"The number of reaction scenarios we need to have for the entire game is well under 100. And they tend to fall into really broad swaths of types, so we only needed to make around a half dozen of those.

Next, it's all data driven already, so those are just entries in a table. It is all run off abstract properties. We do not need to define how oak responds to fire, everything made of wood reacts the same way. We *can* do things like more or less speed in burning, but that's just a number field, and it's optional.

We don't need to make every cell remember your footstep. We just need to make any cell able to respond to a footstep based on what's in the cell.

Basically, it's all very generic rules. So generic, in fact, that the forest burning, the river flowing, and rock eroding to sand all work in the exact same way."