Just a hunch - SpatialOS on the back-end?!

ArchivedUser

Some of you may be familiar with SpatialOS from Improbable... it surfaced a short couple years ago, and is effectively a cloud computing platform that meshes together servers, tracks persistence, and all kinds of stuff a persistent game world (or a real world simulation!) needs for scaling. It's a huge amount of pre-fab tech that allows smaller developers to get out of the gate with their ideas quickly, rather than building these systems from scratch!

Readers here may be most familiar with it from Chronicles of Elyria, but there are some other notable games such as Rebel Horizons, Worlds Adrift and others that are making use of the tech.

They have a close partnership with Google, and very recently scored an investment round of $502m (yes, that's half-a-billion US dollars) from SoftBank. THAT is a big deal. There is a huge upside to this beyond games, including city infrastructure planning and simulation... and more.

ANYHOO

Intrepid has been pretty tight-lipped on back-end tech so far, and the recent studio tour with Technical Director Jason Crawford's screens blurred out got me thinking...




I might be making a leap here, but I suspect they might be evaluating SpatialOS for Ashes of Creation, and haven't announced anything yet because they are still testing and/or want to make it a nice joint-announcement for both companies when the timing is right!

If so, this would be a huge win for the possibilities of the game... the size of the world and tracking everything down to the perishability over time of every single apple in my Freehold pantry!

Anyway, just thinking out loud and would be curious to hear the 

ArchivedUser

Im not sure what to think really apart from more money means more content 

ArchivedUser

so pure speculation with a photo for misdirection? gotcha

ArchivedUser

I mentioned in an earlier thread months ago that SpacialOS would be a good thing to look at for Intrepid. I wouldn't be surprised if they did go down this route specifically for this:

You need a system that monitors every persons interactions with the world so that xp can be attributed to the appropriate node, as well as determining a set of criteria being met to trigger an event. This requires huge system resources to monitor all the variables and make sure that NPCs follow behaviours that aren't scripted directly. So they could script a dragon to spawn under X criteria, and move towards a node. They then let SpacialOS monitor criteria across the whole world and once met it spawns a dragon, set to a specific level of difficulty tuned to the local node size. It then moves towards the node and attacks buildings until killed.

Scripting individual events could be resource intensive, this is a clever way of creating a hugely dynamic event system.

It could be anything though so I wouldn't take it as a sign of anything in particular.

ArchivedUser

Truly fascinating stuff!  Not a tech guy myself, by any stretch of the imagination.  Only know enough to get by, honestly.  But, I do find your thoughts, though speculative, quite informative. as well.  

ArchivedUser

A bit more to add... I know Steven said that AoC would be "sharded" so there will be different servers (in fact the design of the game counts on differences in content across servers!)  SptatialOS projects so far mostly seem to be focusing on bringing all players together in "one" world. 

But there are other strengths of SpatialOS that any virtual world can make use of. Perhaps the world size itself and number of concurrent players might benefit Ashes design (which again is where SpatialOS can come into play!)

Anyway, I hope we hear more about their approach to the backend soon... !