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Ambient: The Multiplayer Game Engine

ambient.run

41–50 of 148 posts

Re: Ambient: The Multiplayer Game Engine

#41
post #33
post #31

A game engine for the Web without any usable demo, only a video. Who knows how it came to be. Being used to most Web productions never coming at the level of Infinity Blade, seeing a video isn't really something that impresses the crowd. https://www.polygon.com/2013/9/10/4715534/infinity-blade-3-c...

Not trying to be rude, but I can’t decipher what you are saying in the second paragraph. Is infinity blade created using the Ambient engine, or does it have deceptive demo videos, or what? Sorry, not trying to be dense.

Infinity Blade was an iOS game released 13 years ago that was among the first to truly show off what you could do in 3d on an iPhone. It was an early killer app.

Re: Ambient: The Multiplayer Game Engine

#42
post #8

I wonder how it can scale? Even with the battle royale craze, it seems like nothing has really replicated Planetside 2's black magic netcode (or at least amassed a playerbase big enough to show it off).

> it seems like nothing has really replicated Planetside 2's black magic netcode Or tried to. From what I’ve read online they massively rely on client-side computation, even for hit detection. It seems more like trading security for performance than any sort of technical miracle black magic. Unless I’ve missed something?

I know Planetside 1 was pretty heavy on client side - not sure about PS2 (but my impression was that it would be less client side logic - to avoid some of the cheating.

Re: Ambient: The Multiplayer Game Engine

#43

Engines that reached escape velocity often did so by having usable artist tools and [...] no, that's pretty much the defining factor. Artists used them. Seeing people in the age of 2 commercial engines (and only one you can reliably ship with...) attempt to challenge architectures the incumbents instilled, knowing the challenge of getting games made with a new engine, gives my cynicism a run for its' money.

Yep, good tools was the minimum a decade ago, these days you also need an asset store. I suspect the next decade you will need to have integrated AI tools.

The only opensource game engine that looks interesting is Godot, they are working hard on making their tools better and growing their asset store.

Re: Ambient: The Multiplayer Game Engine

#44

This confused me: > Ambient is a single executable which can run on Windows, Mac and Linux Until I read this: > Note that content is always streamed so the only thing the joining user requires is Ambient itself to join the session. So that's what the wasm is for. Even the client code is streamed to the client when you connect to a server. Interesting take. I hope it's not, as someone else said, an "open core" SaaS wh…

> the runtime handles synchronization of data for you.

The first implementation probably just synchronizes every single change in state of the worlds database.

I wonder if you can flag things that only the server should know, and somehow calculate what each client can see and know about.

Re: Ambient: The Multiplayer Game Engine

#46
> The compiled assets are always streamed to clients, so that they can immediately start playing without having to download all of the content first.

I think there's a real opportunity here, if done well. It should be feasible to get initial load times down to single digit seconds, https://venge.io style, but then with progressive enhancement to AAA level graphics assets. I think that could be disruptive.

Load times on most games are ridiculously huge especially if you include download/install times, which you should, and not just initially but for patches too. There's no fundamental reason it needs to be so slow, and I think the industry is underestimating how much it's collectively costing them.

Re: Ambient: The Multiplayer Game Engine

#47

What are the guarantees about the networking? I saw this in the blog post: > The server state is automatically synchronized to clients, and the data model is the same on the server and client. This means that in the future you can move your code between backend and frontend, or even run it on both seamlessly. Different types of games need different types of networking. It seems like it's going to be hard to reason ab…

[deleted]

Re: Ambient: The Multiplayer Game Engine

#48
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not trying to be rude, but I can’t decipher what you are saying in the second paragraph. Is infinity blade created using the Ambient engine, or does it have deceptive demo videos, or what? Sorry, not trying to be dense.

Infinity Blade was an iOS game released 13 years ago that was among the first to truly show off what you could do in 3d on an iPhone. It was an early killer app.

Might also be thinking of Epic Citadel which was a related UE3 to WebGL tech demo

https://web.archive.org/web/20140210210113/http://www.unreal...

Re: Ambient: The Multiplayer Game Engine

#49
post #36

Just by seeing those two peeps in the sofa I immediately knew they were Swedish (and right I was). :) Isn't it funny how easy it is to sometimes spot your own nationality? Congrats on the release!

[flagged]

Tiny? It's quite a bit larger than California.

Re: Ambient: The Multiplayer Game Engine

#50

What are the guarantees about the networking? I saw this in the blog post: > The server state is automatically synchronized to clients, and the data model is the same on the server and client. This means that in the future you can move your code between backend and frontend, or even run it on both seamlessly. Different types of games need different types of networking. It seems like it's going to be hard to reason ab…

Not necessarily, emulators has been doing this a while I think and with WASM this is the second impl I'm seeing of this.

Basically, keep a "full" state backlog and ship user control events, if control events arrive late you simulate forward to "now" from the backlog with corrected input.

I've been working on something very similar, gonna comment on the top-level.

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