Re:How we built an auto-scalable Minecraft server for 1000+ ...
by evgen on Tuesday September 07, 2021 @04:20AM
(#28442329)
Forgive the late follow-up, but my first startup in the valley did this back in the mid-90s (Electric Communities, everal EC founders and key hires are mentioned in the Snow Crash acknowledgements) and it is amusing to see people continue to make the same mistakes and step on the same landmines every few years. EC created an entire language (E) to try to hide the complexity and remain secure, had a PERT chart where an actual color on the chart (purple I think) was used to signify that this task would be a good PhD thesis for someone, and really only managed to get a feel for just how large this elephant was before eventually pivoting in a direction that had the possibility to lead to profit in the pre-dotCom era. At best, I think they managed to stumble in the right direction for close to a decade by collecting a large group of really smart people and somehow keeping them happy and engaged for several years and through the ability of the president of the company to get Hollywood people to keep throwing money at them year after year. If you want an interesting read for the evening you should find a copy of Chip Morningstar's 'Cyberspace Protocols Requirements' paper; it holds up incredibly well for something written almost 25 years ago when most people were still on dial-up and we thought 64MB of RAM and a Pentium Pro was too much to require on the client side...
I'd like to hear more about that. nagle at animats.com, if you don't want to say much in public.
This ties into the "metaverse" business. Lots of metaverse talk about big seamless worlds full of user-created content, but not much is running. So far, nothing with user created content really scales. There are lots of little shared worlds, like Breakroom/Sinespace, Facebook Horizon, IMVU, etc. There are big-space voxel worlds, such as Dual Universe and Roblox. There are general purpose region-oriented big "seamless" worlds such as Second Life, which have trouble at the seams and can't handle crowds in one place, the same problem these Minecraft improvers hit in round 1.
Spatial OS was going to fix all this. Their system is basically objects which can be accessed remotely and which migrate to where the most accesses are coming from. It cost over $100 million to develop, they had to do the hosting, and the first four games all went broke due to the high cost of hosting. So, since they had too much venture capital, they set up an in-house game studio and created Scavengers, which is reportedly a so-so shooter.
Roblox has plans to solve this, somehow, by sheer money power. When you have a few billion dollars to spare, that might work.
If we're headed for the "metaverse", this has to be cracked. Somehow.
(I've been writing a multi-threaded Rust/Vulkan client for Second Life / Open Simulator so I'm painfully aware of these problems.)