Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam • Hacker News Board

Re: Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam

#221

Post by husainhz7 » Sat, May 29, 2021, 12:05 PM UTC

Aeolun wrote: post #204

kleinsch wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, I’ve found it interesting reading about YC companies from this batch that include: - A scam MMO - Terminal autocomplete as a service - A Splitwise clone - An app that puts your next meeting in your menu bar (for $10/month!) YC gets 5K+ applications/cycle, accepts 1-3%, so they rejected 4500+ companies for these?

Didn’t Oculus sound just as crazy when it was conceived? As far as I know the founder had barely any experience with hardware. Just a glorified gamer.

His wikipedia[1] page states that he was a VR enthusiast for quite a while, building several prototypes before launching the kickstarter [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Luckey

Re: Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam

#222

Post by _qzu4 » Sat, May 29, 2021, 12:14 PM UTC

nmfisher wrote: post #212

dvt wrote: post #8

I've been following the DreamWorld saga on YouTube for a hot minute now, mainly because I find it so interesting how they got through the YC vetting process when I myself have applied twice (maybe 3 times) and I also know plenty of people -- brilliant, motivated, entrepreneurial folks -- that applied many (many) times as well and were rejected (YC is mega-competitive after all). IMO, it's a bit insulting to the strug…

The dirty secret is that, despite what they may claim, venture capitalists aren’t good at picking winners, nor do they need to be. The real skill is in (a) raising funds from LPs, and (b) creating a wide enough deal funnel to service it. The individual investments aren’t that important, just like a single bet doesn’t matter when you’re playing poker. It’s more about spreading the money over as many hands as possible…

This. It’s always funny how people jumps to the VCs defence when they make obviously bad investments. They simply aren’t good at picking winners.

Re: Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam

#223

Post by torginus » Sat, May 29, 2021, 12:40 PM UTC

thu2111 wrote: post #215

setr wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think graphics rendering is really the problem — worst comes to worst, you just reduce graphical fidelity — and regardless, rendering 300 AI characters roaming around is clearly doable, and it’d be the same with viewing real players. It’s a client-side problem, and doesn’t have to really scale much with player count (Stadia’s main pitch was that you didn’t need high end PCs to play AAA games — not that it wou…

That's not necessarily the hard part. I mean, it's hard, but it's not the hard part. We know this because what this game is trying to do is done already a long time ago. It's a description of the original vision for Second Life. In fact Second Life was explicitly an attempt to create "the metaverse", with all user-generated content. Linden Labs used to write about the challenges they faced in making that vision real…

There are tons of examples of physics engines running on the GPU. Contact resolution (particularly between simple shapes) is an embarassingly parallel problem. I don't think it would be impossible to handle millions of collisions per frame on a modern GPU, maybe even CPU. Also, what counted as a high-end server a decade ago probably is much more affordable with today's technology. You can also probably design a scripting system/set of game rules which allow unobserved NPCs/objects to sleep when no player is around them.

User content can probably be limited as well so that people don't upload overly complex/poorly performing 3d assets.

I'm not saying that this isn't a tall order, but I think it's far more manageable by a sufficiently determined and talented team than it was decades ago.

Re: Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam

#224

Post by jerome-jh » Sat, May 29, 2021, 1:10 PM UTC

angrais wrote: post #91

ElectricalUnion wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 200 in one place 200 players in one map instance. But not 200 visible player with interactions refreshing on real time. Most likely you see diminishing level of details, if anything besides complete fabrication or no data at all after a certain visibility range threshold.

It's an open world game, but let's assume you mean local map. In that case, let's assume that each player waves (/wave). I've done this before with >50 players and took a screenshot and we were all in sync. It's also possible to have 50 players in the same area fighting in real time, e.g., in a battleground. This was back in 2010 when I played ... So I am not sure if it's any fabrication at all, otherwise everyone wo…

Maybe all players where in sync because of tick granularity.

Re: Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam

#225

Post by tom_mellior » Sat, May 29, 2021, 1:35 PM UTC

duskwuff wrote: post #92

tom_mellior wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> default unreal 4 templates, art from asset packs I don't understand this criticism. Using existing asset packs seems sensible to me. It's a tiny team that seems to have more software engineering than graphic design experience. Focusing on the game itself first and using placeholder assets allows them to make progress for now. It can be made pretty later, when there is an actual game. If it were the other way around…

Using content from a wide variety of asset packs is a problem because it means the resulting game will be visually and thematically incoherent. You can see a lot of this already in their demo videos -- there's visible conflicts between their realistic and cartoony content, detailed vs. lo-fi, shiny vs. gritty, fantasy vs. science fiction... this all makes for a real hodgepodge of content in the game, and it's going t…

If it's going to be a hodgepodge anyway due to user-generated content, wouldn't that be another argument for not trying too hard to develop their own integrated visual theme?

(Not that I think that "user-generated" content will work well. If any of it is owned, or merely claimed to be owned, by litigious copyright holders, that's a good way to get YouTube to ban gameplay videos. There goes your free advertising. I wonder how Second Life deals with this.)

Re: Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam

#226

Post by imtringued » Sat, May 29, 2021, 2:13 PM UTC

throwaway316943 wrote: post #81

ElectricalUnion wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 200 in one place 200 players in one map instance. But not 200 visible player with interactions refreshing on real time. Most likely you see diminishing level of details, if anything besides complete fabrication or no data at all after a certain visibility range threshold.

The spiffing Brit managed to get 500 people into a single Factorio game, not all visible at the same time but all interacting with the environment. It was an interesting video, the performance was fairly good.

Buildings are more CPU intensive than players unless those players are all busy fighting. If they just mine or place buildings they simply don't matter.

Re: Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam

#227

Post by opportune » Sat, May 29, 2021, 2:13 PM UTC

gnopgnip wrote: post #145

angrais wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you explain how world of Warcraft works then? You can certainly have more than 200 in one place at once... Are they doing some tricks to make this appear as if it's working but in reality it is not? Would love to hear your opinion.

In Eve online the largest battle had ~6500 players concurrently. Eve has a system called time dilation to help handle large fights. During a normal battle, every player's actions are processed by the server, and the state is sent to all players at least once every second. When there are too many players and actions for this to happen, the servers overall tick rate slows down. So for this fight time dilation was down…

Nit: that is quadratic scaling, not exponential

Re: Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam

#228

Post by otabdeveloper4 » Sat, May 29, 2021, 2:13 PM UTC

devit wrote: post #217

clappski wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100mbps is much much faster than a the majority of consumer broadband connections, I don’t think that’s a particularly realistic figure. Don’t these games have to support a lowest common denominator type speed rather than a fantastic one? I’m not in game dev so not sure if there’s ways to get around things like that

100mbps is at or below entry level for fiber in major cities, and outside major cities it's what Starlink claims to provide, and also in the VDSL and 4G range. A "fantastic" customer connection speed currently would be 2.5gbps or 10gbps.

Do you know anybody who doesn't use WiFi to connect to the Internet?

I don't. (But maybe I just don't know any professional gamers.)

And 100mbps is not realistic for modern WiFi setups.

Re: Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam

#229

Post by imtringued » Sat, May 29, 2021, 2:24 PM UTC

nemothekid wrote: post #152

bentcorner wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not an MMO dev but my random guess is that there's not a lot that needs to be directly p2p. I've only played FF14 but most of the interactions you have don't require you to have precise locations of your party. Server has a tick rate and for mechanics you need to be aware of server latency. Most everything can be calculated server side and/or predicted. Many abilities often have a cast time which can be used to hide…

Unless you are playing on console, almost nothing is p2p in gaming (Due to cheaters). The server has to simulate the entire "world", and as I understand it, the problem becomes when you have one server instance simulating a world for 100s of players. The said, FTA I think people are focusing on the wrong side of aisle. From what I understand, I don't think anything they said is impossible; it just seems like the team…

player to player, not peer to peer

Re: Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam

#230

Post by zamalek » Sat, May 29, 2021, 2:51 PM UTC

coldcode wrote: post #58

I know what building an MMO is like, having worked on one 10 years ago that was already 10 years old and still exists today (small audience though). Building something like these people are talking about requires more $ than a Marvel superhero movie to get anywhere. We could manage about 100 simultaneous players visible to each other in a reasonable time but no more; the internet is not fast enough to manage more tha…

> 100 simultaneous players visible to each other in a reasonable time but no more; the internet is not fast enough to manage more than that many "people" with anything resembling real behavior

I participated in a tech demo test about 2 years back, with roughly 3000 players interacting in non-trivial ways (server authoritative). UDP exists. GPGPU exists (NVIDIA helped improve PhysX for this specific scenario). A massive amount of users is not impossible.

This MMO does otherwise otherwise impossible.