So will the future of gaming allow you to world jump or portal from one game into your friends game/world space and drag them into your game or join theirs.
Unity looks like it nearly has the tools to do this, a core engine/platform, scenes/multiple scenes and asset bundles.
In theory your Unity game should run as long as it has a compatible Player Engine to run on.
Could one Unity game/server send enough information to another to present a limited portal between worlds?
Would we need more of a server based game system with a thin client player to do this?
So in other words, effectively the same thing as closing one game and opening another.
There’s no denying that “convenience” is a powerful impetus for innovation. But the amount of overlap in design this would take probably makes this unfeasible. I’ve never dabbled with MP or servers so I wouldn’t know all that entails.
Edit: Now if you mean just one game with a bunch of different user-made scenes that all have different gameplay, then sure I could see that. I think we already have different forms of this. But really with your whole “portal between worlds” thing you’re making something that we can already do much more cumbersome for the sake of being “cool.” And players will take some cumbersome-ness for that, but not a whole lot.
Unity isn’t even remotely close to having the tools to do this. Unless you’re referring to simply being able to see the current activity taking place and switching games, you will need a significant framework because this concept usually goes in line with the concept of carrying your progress (equipment, inventory, etc) between worlds.
On the other hand if you’re merely referring to a nexus that allows you to see the activities of other players and completely switch to a different game, then Steam already has the necessary infrastructure (streaming to friends, launching games by asking to join a friend, etc) to handle this.
I think protal knights tried to do something like that. Anyway.
You can’t see what is happening in another world without receiving data from it. To look through the portal, you need to load the world beyond the portal or receive a “thumbnaiL” or a video stream through it. So, if you have 5 portals, you’ll need to connect to all five worlds, receive game state from them just to see what is going on there.
As long as your bandwidth and amount of memory can handle that, it probably could be done. The transition probably won’t be truly seamless, unless each world is literally run on a dedicated server and those servers are really close to each other.
Bandwidth is the primary problem, and his sister, latency. Even single player game on a single machine has to deal with loading and stearming, imagine other the net… so in some way it’s possible, it’s already how big game works, but they hide the flaws with clever trick. If it’s just jumping between world, no net, then using low poly graphics (psx) and very simple logic can do it as we could just store the entire world on ram, internet will always have issues, the number of simultaneous objects and events to sync is the issue.
