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