Here’s how a team of five at Bossa Studios created Worlds Adrift, a sandbox MMO set in a world of a scale, complexity and level of detail never attempted before, where thousands of players can interact simultaneously, with no more effort than it takes to build a single-player game.
This post also goes into some detail, for the first time, about the Entity-Component-Worker model, and how it enables small teams to build games of such a scale and complexity in a simple and efficient way.
SpatialOS is available to Unity developers right now – we can’t wait to see what new kind of games become possible when scale and complexity are not an issue. 10,000 players in a single massive FPS battle? Incredibly realistic worlds on your mobile phone? The kind of immersive experiences VR deserves? Up to you!
SpatialOS is a bad name. OS typically stands for operating system. And those aren’t very spatial since they are virtual. Who wants a spatial operating system? Sounds like one of the early computers that occupied a whole room!
What does their choice of art style have to do with the capabilities of their technology and game design?
What they’re talking about is cluster computing. Each “server” is actually a node in the cluster and can actually be relatively weak hardware (could even be someone’s old laptop for example). Such clusters scale horizontally, so when you need more computing power you just hook up a bunch of new nodes rather than buying expensive new hardware to replace what you’ve got (vertical scaling).
So when they say 150 servers, they don’t mean the big, powerful servers that normally power MMOs.
This sounds like an awesome game with the focus placed exactly on the areas I always think about right down to the core of interaction and life cycles of the inhabitants. I’ll have to check it out. I am actually a bit surprised they did it in Unity because it is not the typical game people seem to focus on around here.
@Martin_H … True and also most randomly assembled 5-member teams will fail to complete anything at all… even Flappy Bird.
3 to 5 enthusiastic and skilled developers focusing on such a project could certainly complete it. The issue is around here generally the only folks who want to make a “big” game are the people with no experience and skills. Outside of here there are people with experience and skills building such things. Which I guess basically is the same thing @Kiwasi stated. Yeah @Kiwasi I agree.
@ggambetta It’s an interesting sales pitch, especially considering I’ve been watching Worlds Adrift for a while with interest in playing once it’s released.
But how about more information on the technology package you’re selling? I looked at your web site but did not see any information on your revenue model. One-time purchase? Revenue share? Monthly fees? That could certainly make a big difference in people’s interest in your product.
Congrats for the game, but I hope that it is just a proof of concept for fun because :
1 server per each 10 players seem like the perfect recipe for a commercial suicide, even if you had a on the fly scaling solution.
That’s why it’s always advised against doing mmo, because there is a difference between doing it and doing it in a way that is financially sustainable and even expert studios often fail even when backed by investors with deep pockets.
Looks interesting. I’ll give it a shot in a couple of weeks. I’m wondering though what the business model looks like. There isn’t any information available about pricing structures or license models.
I signed up up out of genuine curiosity. The demos look interesting as are the claims. The pitch and marketing is polished and nothing set off my bs detector. (working in Silicon Valley, my bs detector has gotten pretty battle tested )
My two concerns are 1) the tech details are mostly non-existent (understandable in a marketing site). And 2) as mentioned above, revenue model. It does claim that it is open source, which makes the revenue model even more confusing.
Hopefully getting to test it in action will address those concerns. If it is as it claims, it could be pretty amazing.
@ggambetta Wow Gabriel! You’re ALIVE! I haven’t seen you around (granted I wasn’t really looking) since Wild West Wendy!
I know this forum is FULL of people who, for good reason, get uncomfortable with anyone who uses the term MMO. That said, for anyone else, I can vouch that Gabriel has been around forever and is in fact, the real deal. No clue if his engine is good, haha, but at the very least he isn’t some noob with dreams that don’t match his years of experience.
It might not be servers per player, it could be servers per area. Still… even that area statistic seems very marketing-ey. It quotes a huge area, but as the video clearly shows the vast majority of that area is either empty or populated only by clouds, and achieving it required “625 Unity engines collaborating”. The lack of technical info means we can’t really evaluate what those markety numbers might actually mean for developers.
Ok now the way you get that mass of players together in a single world is by splitting the world into many regions running on many servers and players/entities on different regions of the world (on different servers) can’t interact.
So that FTS battle in your sails pitch ain’t gonna happen, unless you count 1000 fps rooms a single battle.
I’m pretty sure the way they set it up is each of their islands is running on a different server and empty space might also be a separate server.
And the reason their islands are so far apart and hidden by clouds is (besides the nice atmosphere) because for you to see other islands would require a hell of a lot of bandwidth and cpu time, which costs a lot.
The difference from most MMOs is that it’s just that transition between servers appears smooth, they don’t use portals.
But still none of the ideas they mention is new, they are just trying to sell their product with few big unspecific words.
That said I really like the aesthetics and, as a fan of an old 2d game where the main way of movement is using hooks, I’m looking forward to playing this!
Gameplay remains me of Attack On Titan
Neither of those are even remotely related to anything.
Indeed. Though now that you point that out (sparse smaller areas nearby enough to interact if needed, but obscured enough to not require full 1:1 constant sync), that is kind of an elegant solution. Whether that is the actual case or not. I am a fan of creative solutions in design to compensate for technical challenges.
But yea, reading through the marketing, it raised a lot of questions. Distributed servers sounds plausible, but there is still some syncing that needs to happen, and in my mind, I see that as a challenge. Is there replication? Is there still a central authoritative server/node? What happens in a lost/dropped server? Is the resource and traffic cost more risky or unstable than a dedicated server farm with tons of ram?
It sounds like they have it worked out, a lot of pie in sky ideas rely on "imagine if… " nonsense. I didn’t really get that from site. Plus @ironbellystudios saying he is a straight shooter backs that up. Looking forward to seeing where this goes.
From the announced features it surely sounds like an implementation similar to Planetside 2’s network structure. Even though there are several hundred people playing in the same area, this area is sub-split and only the closest players sync very often. (the farther away, the less sync)
@Tomnnn It is a distributed operating system, in the sense that it can run an “application” (your game) in a cluster of machines, where the processes are what we call “workers” (AI engines, Unity engines, etc). There are more details about the interaction between SpatialOS and Unity in this other blog post.
Yeah 