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World Engine: Introducing game sharding, a high-performance full-chain game platform
Original post by Scott Sunarto@Argus Labs
Original title: INTRODUCING WORLD ENGINE BY ARGUS
From Magnavox Odyssey (the first commercial video game console launched in 1972) to Ultima Online (an MMORPG game product released in 1997). The video game industry is constantly fueled by rebels who are always crazy enough to try to create the seemingly impossible.
Argus is a game developer and publisher of hackers and designers dedicated to driving the next big paradigm shift in the video game industry.
Our mission: to be the pioneer of game Internet
We are proud to announce our first seed for the future gaming world - World Engine, a blockchain system redesigned for full-chain games. World Engine provides a basic framework for game developers, allowing them to build and customize their own open and interoperable game worlds. Through World Engine's new Layer 2 sharding architecture, each game can have its own blockchain infrastructure that can scale horizontally and grow together.
01. The status quo: The game industry is still in isolation
Although online games were born on the Internet, they are currently isolated, forcibly cut off from a potentially complete game universe. While game designers, developers, and players strive to create more novel ways to play, user-generated content, and platforms in games, the underlying infrastructure on which we run games contributes little.
Game developers are shackled by the shackles of mainstream platforms. And gamers, while craving greater creative freedom, have always been limited in their access to core game logic and data. The fact that games cannot seamlessly communicate with each other hinders innovation in game design and inhibits the development of a cross-game economy.
02. Create superior content driven by technological breakthroughs
The pursuit of fun goes hand in hand with exploring novel technological prototypes. Imagine if John Carmack said "forget it, let's keep making 2D games" instead of developing Doom and the real-time 3D technology he used; the video game industry would be a completely different face today.
Every once in a while, a technological catalyst disrupts the video game industry, offering innovative and nimble startups a chance to challenge what was once the industry's hegemony.
These technological catalysts have inspired generations of video game developers and publishers. However, this battle isn't something that can be easily won simply by tweaking the playbook of its predecessors. Instead, innovators discover new forms of play that differentiate their medium and develop them vigorously.
**The winner in the age of Internet gaming is not "Internet-connected Pac-Man"! **
**The winner in the era of encrypted games will definitely not be "Hearthstone with NFT issued"! **
Argus believes that the blockchain will be the next technological catalyst to promote the development of the game industry. It is a testing ground that can allow the game world to exceed the lifespan of its creators, release players' creative freedom, provide more novel gameplay, and inspire cross-game development. A new medium of economic activity.
Argus is an uncompromising crypto company and an uncompromising gaming company. The ultimate goal is to achieve both without giving up either one.
03. The Dilemma of Game Infrastructure
The origin of Argus can be traced back to 2020, when my friends (Gubsheep, Alan Luo, etc.) and I jointly developed Dark Forest, the first full-chain MMORTS game on Ethereum.
We're trying to answer a simple but crazy question: "What happens when you create a game where all actions happen on-chain?"
The release of Dark Forest offers a glimpse into the future of crypto gaming: a great game that can co-exist with player-driven content, tools, and platforms that interact and interact directly on top of the core game state and ruleset. combination.
Through smart contracts, players can independently build various plug-ins such as game item trading market, information exchange center, guild system, and mercenary system. This ability to freely create and enrich the game world without interference from the project party makes many players very excited.
However, we also found that building a full-chain game like Dark Forest is still a daunting task for many developers.
The current blockchain is not designed to run games
Developing games on the blockchain is like developing games on Microsoft Excel. While he may be Turing complete, he places a lot of restrictions on how programs can be written.
For example, blockchain smart contracts cannot be automatically executed at every fixed time interval to implement the "game loop" system essential in game servers. This creates additional headaches for game developers and limits their creativity.
Therefore, many game developers are only satisfied with putting in-game items on the chain as NFTs, while full-chain game developers can only create within a limited design space, limiting them to simple strategy or turn-based In the game, it is only because these games have very low requirements for interaction frequency.
The existing blockchain game infrastructure is a patchwork solution glued together with duct tape
In recent years, many companies have attempted to become the “shovels and shovels” of the crypto game (referring to providing infrastructure services), however, current approaches are limited in capacity and often do not address the root cause of the problem.
For example, many L1/L2 blockchains claim to be "blockchains for games", but on closer inspection they are nothing more than "blockchains for JPEGs".
When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail; as a result, many crypto games rely solely on NFTs as a substitute for in-game assets with limited benefit to the end user. At the same time, this way of thinking also creates a kind of self-limitation, which hinders the exploration of new full-chain game modes. These experiments could have unlocked a large number of novel game design logics and brand-new game experiences.
On the other hand, game developers in the on-chain gaming community have had to resort to “band-aid” solutions to bridge the infrastructure gap. While these solutions make the development process slightly easier, the inherent limitations of current blockchain architectures and virtual machines force game developers to make a lot of compromises, while also not providing a clear path to future commercialization. performance support.
04. Let's get to know World Engine
"The beginning of a new world - I call him the seed.
Once he sprouts, you'll know what he is.
How you use him is up to you. " - Kayaba Akihiko
The release of Dark Forest exposed an obvious problem: the current blockchain infrastructure is not suitable for supporting full-chain games. As a one-size-fits-all solution, the limitations of existing blockchain architectures are becoming more and more apparent as we continue to push the limits of their computing power and flexibility.
In order to solve this problem, we asked ourselves: if we were to design a blockchain for games from the ground up, and only for games, while retaining interoperability and composability, what should it look like?
That's how World Engine was born.
World Engine is a sharded layer 2 blockchain SDK with game developers and players in mind. As a layer 2 blockchain, World Engine inherits the security and decentralization of the underlying blockchain, allowing game developers to focus on what they do best: creating unforgettable gaming experiences.
Scale horizontally with your game: perform sharding
World Engine's main innovation lies in its sharding design, inspired by the server architecture of computationally intensive massively multiplayer online (MMO) games.
Sharding allows game developers to distribute their game load across different shards. Thus, a World Engine chain can adjust its throughput according to demand, growing in tandem with developers or publishers. At the same time, World Engine's sharding architecture avoids the interoperability/platform fragmentation issues that arise when scaling by launching another separate rollup.
Expressive and performant game backend: Game Sharding
World Engine's sharding approach also allows the game execution layer (game sharding) to be separated from the smart contract execution layer (EVM sharding). Thus, this opens up a wide design space for building an optimized state machine dedicated to handling game-related computations.
Using game sharding can help us avoid the performance bottlenecks encountered in running games directly on existing blockchain virtual machines, such as:
Through game sharding, we will be able to provide the high-throughput game server performance you expect while maintaining blockchain interoperability.
**We are pleased to introduce our first game sharding implementation - Cardinal. **
Cardinal is a high-performance game shard capable of handling performance-intensive gaming workloads. Cardinal's Entity-Component-System (ECS) architecture provides a familiar development environment for developers with no previous crypto game development experience.
Cardinal game logic is written in Go - this eliminates the need for developers to learn a new programming language such as Solidity or Vyper. Last but not least, Cardinal can be seamlessly integrated with existing game engines such as Unity and Unreal through client libraries; no more dealing with complex blockchain integration issues!
Seamless Interoperability Layer: Customizable and Gamified EVM Sharding
World Engine's EVM base shard (EVM base shard) provides a hub for players and developers to build user-generated content and platforms, and communicate with game shards ( Game Shards) seamlessly interoperate. In addition to its sharding capabilities, World Engine's EVM sharding is functionally similar to an EVM rollup, allowing you to use all developer tools, wallets, and libraries, just like in Ethereum.
The fun features don't stop there. Thanks to Polaris, a high-performance modular EVM framework developed by Berachain, World Engine's EVM slices can be expressively customized through its stateful precompilation and plug-in system, and then implement some practical functions, such as subsidizing gas for users, Even complete some crazy ideas, such as gamification deployment of smart contracts.
You are only limited by your own imagination.
05. Try to develop with World Engine
Today, we're excited to announce that we're accepting a small number of teams to participate in World Engine's internal beta event.
World Engine internal test application link:
As part of an internal beta, you will have the opportunity to experience World Engine before anyone else, while we provide a direct support channel with the World Engine core team to help you with any issues, technical or non-technical (game design, GTM, etc.).
The closed beta will give us the opportunity to fully incorporate your feedback in the months leading up to the official release.
06. Explore the future game Internet
We see World Engine as the shared backbone network that builds the internet of games. As the world increasingly embraces open and interoperable games, World Engine will not only allow games to communicate with each other, but will allow game developers to build an ecosystem of tools, platforms and building blocks on top of it.
As World Engine stewards, we believe the following guiding principles are critical to achieving this goal:
It's time to usher in a new era of video games. An era where creatives, hackers, and geniuses lead the industry again.
Together we will redefine the value of games.
Together we will sow the seeds for the future of gaming.
Thanks to Breck Stodghill (Haun Ventures), Rachael Horwitz (Haun Ventures), Calvin Liu (Eigenlayer), Jacob Arluck (Celestia), and Ekram (Celestia) for reviewing drafts and providing feedback.