AW and the full-chain game engine narrative, what will Dojo and Mud bring?

原文作者：Simon of IOSG Ventures，Sylve from Dojo &Kooshaba from Lattice

From PCs to mobile internet and even artificial intelligence, gaming has led to the adoption of new technologies by educating a new generation of consumers and creating use cases that would otherwise not exist.

In the process of playing games/making fun games, people try out new technologies and come up with ideas on how to take advantage of them. Gamers can draw a simple conclusion - there are some of the most prominent designers and developers in the gaming industry!

The #Automous World Assembly# held at #Devconnect Instanbul is probably the most insightful and innovative crypto event in recent times. AW, we're seeing people using cryptography to do new things rather than old things better, which is why the IOSG sees AW/FOCG as one of the many avenues to achieve mass adoption. (The following is based on Sylve from Dojo and Kooshaba from Lattice's presentations at the IOSG OFR Istanbul)

Why AW - Dojo：

"Why do people put games on the blockchain?" I would like to try to answer this question.

So far, blockchain games have focused on one thing, which is to put games on the blockchain as little as possible and only put game assets on the chain, and it seems to make sense to do so because it is decentralized and assets are interoperable with other assets. But what happens if you put the gameplay and utility of assets on the blockchain as well?

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On-chain gaming promises a whole bunch of things, and I'd like to summarize them. I would say that they promise to bring to gaming what DeFi brings to traditional finance: decentralization and permissionless compatibility. But we want to take it to a higher level, and that's when we come up with another concept called the autonomous world.

This is still a very vague definition. But the idea is that outside of any given game control, you have a game that is constantly engaged. Think about it, we live in a blockchain-based world where anyone can contribute. And we are based on that definition. If you look at Twitter, everyone has their own idea of what an autonomous world is, how it works, what it should be, and what it shouldn't be. We have a lot of ideas. As a result, a large group of people spend a lot of time and effort trying to even conceptually understand what this means. We even have companies trying to build game engines to help more people get on board and build on-chain games, we have Mud, Dojo, Argus, and Curio. We're pretty sure it's a fun thing to do, and we'd even like more people to join and build it.

Why? Why do we spend so much time and effort doing this? My answer is negative: why shouldn't we do this? It's a really bad idea.

First of all, games are difficult to build on the blockchain. For games, blockchain is not fast enough and too costly. This is not the first time we have heard such a statement. I love this quote from Antonopoulos: "Most networks just can't scale gracefully at all, but these networks are ultimately what we need." He used this metaphor to describe the internet. Usability is not for the internet, and whenever we try to push the limits of the internet, there is a group of people who say, you shouldn't do it on the internet. The internet wasn't made for this.

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When it comes to blockchain, we're basically on the same page. Various initiatives say, "No, you can't put coins on the blockchain, come on, you're going to break the blockchain." If you look at the history of blockchain, most of it was games that completely crashed the network and we're in a situation where we're like, "Please, you can't put game tokens on the blockchain, you're going to ruin everyone's fun." The good thing is that now we have the second and third tiers and launch them as a service which is a huge improvement compared to the previous ones.

I think there are three main things that put games on the blockchain.

We're building this thing with your energy and finances. Blockchain is a legitimate machine. You don't have to trust me, you don't have to trust my reputation, you just have to trust my code. And that's a good thing, a lot of new indie developers and a lot of people can benefit from the legitimacy that blockchain gives them to build this multiplayer world. You don't need to be a Valorant or a Fornite, you just need to build your own game and benefit from the legitimacy that blockchain gives you. That way, people will trust the code, not you.

In my opinion, "permission is possible" is the most interesting part of this. By building this game on the blockchain, people can mix and match. That doesn't mean you can't do it without blockchain. It's just that blockchain is very convenient. You can do this through an API or something else. But it's even more convenient if you have direct access.

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For example, in this example, we have two worlds, A and B. They share the same map, but maybe you have another game where the apps are different, but they show the same game logic, and if you go a step further, you can even find ways to get people to contribute to the world. It's not always a company that provides value to the network. For example, there are games that are played on MUD nowadays, and these people never get tired of it. What happens if you find a way to motivate people?

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In the end, I think it all has to do with the temperament of George Mallory, and when someone asks him why he wants to go to Everest, he says this because Everest is there. I think right now people love challenges, crowds, and great communities. You shouldn't do these things on the blockchain. So, why not do it?

Last week, Lattice, the developer of the full-chain game engine Mud, launched an L2 built on the Op Stack, which can greatly reduce the cost of L1 submissions and can be used to support the operation of full-chain games or DApps in autonomous worlds. Since the beginning of the development of Mud, the Lattice team has been aiming to provide an open-source and shared modular framework for full-chain games or autonomous worlds, hoping to create a common standard and lower the barrier to entry for developers. Redstone has gone to the next level, solving the problem of which chain to use on the whole chain application, and undoubtedly consolidating the one-stop development path of the moat - Mud+Redstone. This may also greatly affect the determination of full-chain games or applications to use RaaS to develop chains.

What AW - Latex

"Why are on-chain games hard, and how can we make them better?" Today I want to talk about how to do a good on-chain game.

We've been doing on-chain games for a while now, and I've been thinking about this a lot. For me, that's the dream, that's why we're here.

I work at Lattice and we've been working on on-chain games, which is a master game engine called Mud and an on-chain framework. I specialize in Sky Strife and game development at Lattice.

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Here's a screenshot of Runescape. Runescape is a browser-based 3D online game that was released in 2001. It's just crazy, and millions of players are still playing it today. I personally spent thousands of hours on Runescape. If you haven't played Runescape, we'll never be friends. It's a very fun game, and I'll describe it a little bit. ](https:/.bit. You) You start at the first level of the game, you are very weak, the goal is to gain new skills, to gain money, to gain influence, to gain power, basically, real life is a bit like a second life for a small child and an immature adult. It's a player-driven thriving economy where money is the main influencer of the game, along with PVP action and permadeath, where you lose everything on the player.

Throughout Runescape's development, player protests against the production crew have occurred from time to time, and it is all related to the economy. Now my question is, what do you do to make Runescape unstoppable? I think, if you ask any regular Runescape player "Hey, do you want to kill everyone who made this game", I think they're going to answer "yes, I want them to disappear and no one should control me." What we wanted was a game that existed on its own and no one could monopolize it, so I put a lot of restrictions in the conversation here. "Autonomous World" is certainly our dream, and what we want is Runescape and an on-chain game that will never be stopped, where no one can control it, no one has the management key, and no one has the ability to upgrade. The logic of this game is 100% on-chain play, no one has access to the game, they can't change your mind, the game has nothing to do with the client. If possible, you can play the game in the terminal window without graphics.

It's a more technical issue, but it's like there's no precompilation, there's no specific application gene, it's not that I'm denigrating these things, it's just that if we want an autonomous world as a dream, these things, these technologies will sacrifice decentralization for the sake of gameplay. We're going to focus on the EVM today, which is the most commonly used execution environment. Let's keep it simple.

Runescape has a gametick of 1.66 hz, which is very slow for a traditional game, and I believe Valorant and CSgo have a tick of 120 hz or 140 hz. So this seems achievable on-chain, right? It's still faster than every other blockchain we've seen, but it has a very simple game loop that we can definitely do on-chain, and what could go wrong?

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Here is the picture of the starting area, right next to the starting area, there is a small goblin village, the player starts from the first level here, in general, the player needs to walk here and start fighting goblins, there are a lot of goblins around. You can spend hours fighting goblins, picking up loot, and more. Okay, the first thing we're going to do is get these goblins moving, okay, it should be fine. In a traditional game architecture, you need a server with a "√" to decide where you want the leprechauns to go. The server just moves them step by step, while the player runs after them and eventually defeats them. We need pathfinding is the first problem here, we need to compute pathfinding on-chain, which is the first obstacle, we need to run navigation on the chain, which is a completely unlimited operation, let's say, the player runs completely out of the starting area of the elf when being chased by the elf, and the elf needs to calculate the objects around it, potentially exceeding the gas limit of the block.

The first limitation is that this goblin will behave stupidly You have to stand very close to the goblin to know that you exist, because it has five moons that can run stars, and the other question is who is going to send these transactions. We don't have servers ticking in the background Someone has to send the transaction in person and say, "Hey leprechaun, you should go attack that player" For example, if you let the player send the transaction themselves, the player will never send the transaction.

Why would I volunteer to let this goblin attack? The traditional on-chain answer to this question is that the only way to respond is for players to interact with the goblin first and fight back at the same time when they attack each other. This doesn't work either, because if the game is nearing its end, you can't attack the goblins anymore. You can run away so there is no danger.

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Therefore, we need to incentivize players in some way to send transactions to run goblins, while at the same time they also pay gas to run those goblins. And all of them, are goblins in game servers, they walk around and feel alive, and you should be afraid of them. For traditional games, this is just the surface, but we already have some weird financial incentives where we need to tell the player, "Hey, we're going to give you a small amount of tokens to get captured by the goblins".

Let's continue the game. We're going to run the graph somewhere, and we need to know where to avoid the goblins, but this time we need to run a coordinate on the chain that the player can calculate for themselves. We offer it to our contracts. The contract only needs to confirm that it is valid. For now, confirmation is still a calculation we need to make, but it's much simpler than running a coordinate, and technically, players can provide whatever path capacity they calculate, as long as it's valid. We can get started.

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Okay, so the result is that the player and the elf are running around and colliding with each other. In addition to elves and players, generally speaking, the game world only has terrain, such as trees, which is a common element in traditional games.

How do we know about the existence of this tree on-chain? Let's not argue about how best to store this tree on-chain. At some point, the tree has to go into a storage space, which is called "gas". The question is, who will pay for the storage of this world. It's like as a game developer, you're responsible for storing the world. This is only the starting area of World of Rune, and the entire world of World of Runetera may be 1, 000 or 2, 000 times the starting area. And it's just relatively simple online games that people can run on their browsers. Due to various limitations, no matter what we do on-chain, scale is extremely limited. This is technically possible, and if you want to spend millions of dollars to move the entire rune world map on-chain, you can do it completely. It can also be done on mainnet.

In Runecrafts, you hit a leprechaun and then you see a number that varies from 0 to 15 When you're level 1, there's a certain randomness to that number, and randomness is another thing that we can't easily achieve on-chain, how do we do that? Every time a player takes an action, we're going to submit a block hash in the past, and then on the next attack, we're going to reveal that block hash and reveal the randomness that this attack is going to bring. It's just a small technical detail, but it's woven through the design of the entire on-chain game.

At any point in this promise reveal scenario, you'll know the outcome of your next move, so you'll never think, oh, I don't know how much damage I'm going to do next. You'll just think about how much damage I'll do after the next attack. It's like a strange thing that players have to solve, when in reality, you're just trying to hide information throughout the stack. But well, our battles are using this weird randomness mechanic, the goblins are moving around, we have the world map, and the players are having a great time.

Awesome What do elves drop? In the traditional rune realm, they drop gold, and you can see that I have a little bit of gold in my inventory. I don't know, between 3 and 5 gold, that's a tap in game design terms, and even a small amount of gold will have someone sitting here for an infinite amount of time. They will abuse this faucet to get unlimited gold from the elf start area. The game is inflationary, which is fine, but in a chain game, it becomes a problem because whatever token you tie to this reward will quickly go to zero, right. So we need to synchronize, we need property destruction in nature, we need a way to get that goal out of the ecosystem, and I think that's going to be a major design decision for all on-chain games. It's like in a traditional online game, you don't need to worry about inflation. But here, I think we need extreme permadeath, your character has to be very fragile Gold has to leave the system at a faster rate It's not a good experience for new players If there's a fear of death around every corner, it's probably just a matter of education, like in our chain game, you should be terrified all the time, it's basically real life.

So well, I don't have a completely satisfying answer on how we can make this all better, but everything I just described is technically achievable on Mainnet. There's nothing stopping you from doing these things on Mainnet except money, but it's really an educational issue, as a shared primitive issue.

Currently, every on-chain game developer is reinventing the wheel when making games. We need to be on the same page when they're writing their own libraries or using their own expertise. We need a shared game engine, a shared framework. You'll have to trust me to do the math on a tissue, but I quickly made a little prototype: I guess if five players and five leprechauns would need about 2.3 million gas per second, which is insane, and if you want to compare it to what we have now, then the theoretical value of mainnet is 2.5 million gas per second. Known as the fastest and most throughput, Arbitram Nova is 7 million gas per second and Uh Base is 15 million gas per second.

I'm sorry if I didn't mention your favorite chain, I'm saying it quickly, but the truth is that we're not there yet, running Unstoppable's goblin start area. Runescape will consume all the resources of the Ethereum mainnet, so let's settle this down. So, yes, just to illustrate: our game isn't too exciting physically, let's say we only have a small village, running on the Ethereum mainnet, and we need chains that can support large worlds.