Revolution on the threshold or another niche for "people in the subject"?
Recent years have been marked by the rapid development of startups of all kinds: from the ideas of “heating up” people with microwave radiation (tested on living people, here they are, all alive, completely) and their ilk to the truly brilliant. In the race for venture capital investments, many lose their heads, sometimes presenting what they wish for as real, when confronted with previously imperceptible stones in seemingly pure cash flow. Today we will talk about one such ingenious (?) Enterprise.
To do this, let's fast forward to the very heart of Misty Albion - fertile ground for young business and crazy ideas. A couple of Cambridge alumni buddies - the irrepressible Herman Narula and the sensible Rob Whitehead, trying to build an easily scalable persistant environment for their ambitious game, quickly realized that it was impossible to achieve what they wanted with the means of well-known libraries and started writing their own implementation. Gradually, our heroes (within the framework of the article, of course) came to understand: the technology they are working on means much more than the game itself. Thus, the idea was born, which forced to throw all the resources, savings, all the time to its implementation.
They call themselves Improbable . Very little is known about the technology itself, but I will share with you the information found. In the big picture, we have a tricky backend, something like an environment, a distributed operating system that controls millions, billions of entities interacting with each other in real time. I believe that this was possible thanks to cloud computing and virtualization like the LXC (an engineer from the team was broadcasting on the recent Container Camp). This opens up the possibility of creating a "strong simulation" (strong simulation) - a virtual space with its own laws and rules, which can change under the influence of its inhabitants. It is not difficult to guess that the technology will easily find application far beyond the gaming industry (although it is the most obvious and monetary): the military industry, energy, the city economy and the economy in general (Macro and Finance), health care. Just imagine: a model of a person’s immune system that requires billions of independent entities, a simulation of a giant tsunami looming on a coastal town with a 100-mile coastline, a model of energy consumption by the entire city system - and this is possible thanks to Improbable.
It is known from open sources that the company is in talks with the UK Department of Defense, Samsung has shown interest in technology in the context of its own projects on the Internet of Things, and Oxford economists are launching models of the UK's “living” domestic market under Improbable.
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And, of course, games. The English indie company Bossa Studios (Surgeon Simulator, Tomas was alone), having deployed only a dozen frontend engineers to develop a huge MMO project, was able to achieve amazing results in a year. And this is considering the cost of developing an average MMO project today, Bossa are being hammered practically “for free”. The game is called Worlds Adrift .
An equally interesting example is ION . About this artifact nothing is known at all, except for the concept: a massive, unified Universe (as in WA) and the very persistance. The author is inspired by the beloved in narrow circles of Space Station 13 . Using Improbable, literally on the knee, he unfolded a world of enormous scale, working according to the laws of physics. In it, players can breathe and be exposed to various gases on the body, temperature, pressure. And there is a simulation of internal organs!
So, I think the question raised in the title is very relevant. Will this be a new milestone in the development of the industry or will it settle somewhere in the abyss of niche products? Let's discuss.
Comments by backend specialists regarding the reality of what is happening (and these guys promise a revolution in online entertainment) are warmly welcome.
Links to sources and other interesting information (for the curious):
0. Article, a little revealing technology and opportunities
1. Article on Improbable
2. Record Narula performances. Strong simulation.
3. Record of the speech of the director Bossa Vince Farquarson. Interesting comments. The reaction of the developers themselves to their creation.
4. Improbable blog
5. Fresh Worlds Adrift Trailer
6. ION teaser
7. ION on Reddit
Prehistory
To do this, let's fast forward to the very heart of Misty Albion - fertile ground for young business and crazy ideas. A couple of Cambridge alumni buddies - the irrepressible Herman Narula and the sensible Rob Whitehead, trying to build an easily scalable persistant environment for their ambitious game, quickly realized that it was impossible to achieve what they wanted with the means of well-known libraries and started writing their own implementation. Gradually, our heroes (within the framework of the article, of course) came to understand: the technology they are working on means much more than the game itself. Thus, the idea was born, which forced to throw all the resources, savings, all the time to its implementation.
Improbable
They call themselves Improbable . Very little is known about the technology itself, but I will share with you the information found. In the big picture, we have a tricky backend, something like an environment, a distributed operating system that controls millions, billions of entities interacting with each other in real time. I believe that this was possible thanks to cloud computing and virtualization like the LXC (an engineer from the team was broadcasting on the recent Container Camp). This opens up the possibility of creating a "strong simulation" (strong simulation) - a virtual space with its own laws and rules, which can change under the influence of its inhabitants. It is not difficult to guess that the technology will easily find application far beyond the gaming industry (although it is the most obvious and monetary): the military industry, energy, the city economy and the economy in general (Macro and Finance), health care. Just imagine: a model of a person’s immune system that requires billions of independent entities, a simulation of a giant tsunami looming on a coastal town with a 100-mile coastline, a model of energy consumption by the entire city system - and this is possible thanks to Improbable.
Creating a world with a strong simulation involves many technical difficulties. One of the biggest is the need to distribute the simulation among thousands of servers in real time. Simulation elements have many interrelated layers of complexity, most of which do not have the property of extreme parallelism (therefore the traditional approach to scaling does not work). You can imagine our approach as a set of decentralized, heterogeneous “workers” working together to create a simulation much more extensive than an individual worker can imagine. With the rapid growth of the world, the most efficient distribution of workers is changing; so they need to move between physical machines in real time. In addition, the system must support a potentially huge number of users interacting with the world simultaneously with each other.
Cooperation
It is known from open sources that the company is in talks with the UK Department of Defense, Samsung has shown interest in technology in the context of its own projects on the Internet of Things, and Oxford economists are launching models of the UK's “living” domestic market under Improbable.
')
And, of course, games. The English indie company Bossa Studios (Surgeon Simulator, Tomas was alone), having deployed only a dozen frontend engineers to develop a huge MMO project, was able to achieve amazing results in a year. And this is considering the cost of developing an average MMO project today, Bossa are being hammered practically “for free”. The game is called Worlds Adrift .
An equally interesting example is ION . About this artifact nothing is known at all, except for the concept: a massive, unified Universe (as in WA) and the very persistance. The author is inspired by the beloved in narrow circles of Space Station 13 . Using Improbable, literally on the knee, he unfolded a world of enormous scale, working according to the laws of physics. In it, players can breathe and be exposed to various gases on the body, temperature, pressure. And there is a simulation of internal organs!
Summary
So, I think the question raised in the title is very relevant. Will this be a new milestone in the development of the industry or will it settle somewhere in the abyss of niche products? Let's discuss.
Comments by backend specialists regarding the reality of what is happening (and these guys promise a revolution in online entertainment) are warmly welcome.
Links to sources and other interesting information (for the curious):
0. Article, a little revealing technology and opportunities
1. Article on Improbable
2. Record Narula performances. Strong simulation.
3. Record of the speech of the director Bossa Vince Farquarson. Interesting comments. The reaction of the developers themselves to their creation.
4. Improbable blog
5. Fresh Worlds Adrift Trailer
6. ION teaser
7. ION on Reddit
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/267527/
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