Could an MMO game based on decentralized, trust-free network design function?
Blockchain tech is slow as fuck but its core concepts (verification via massive redundency, asymmetric encryption, etc.) could potentially be married with distributed computing concepts in such a way that you pay your "subscription fee" by sparing processor cycles to verify the integrity of the game logic - a "compute-to-play" model, if you will. As strict integrity is not needed for all aspects of an online game (occasional lag spikes and/or glitches happen in any game, and it's certainly not the end of the world like getting gypped on a major blockchain transaction would be), network design tradeoffs could be made for higher speed instead.
Hm, this is an interesting idea, shame no one seems to be interested OP. Do you have some safe way of contacting you? We might be able to do something together, who knows?
Bitcoin forks all the time, you could very well do the same for any updates in a "blockchain mmo".
Aiden Young
Right now, it's just a pie-in-the-sky idea. Someday, hopefully someday soon, an open source repo and somewhere to discuss project direction can be established, but for now I'm just evaluating the concept and Sup Forums seems like the best place.
James Jenkins
I’m interested in the idea and have some technical ability. You can email me if you’d like, user. I need more friends to trade ideas with at the very least!
I was just considering making like a small text based MUD where the moves executed by the player would be stored/archived and validated by the blockchain. Might be good to make it even simpler and just make a tic-tac-toe game or something just to test it out.
Just make a thread on like lainchan or a page on github or irc channel or something for those interested to hang out in and share ~~memes~~ ideas.
Yeah, let's see if OP organizes something. If he doesn't, I'll do it, don't worry.
Ryan Cook
I had a similar idea while watching vrchat videos. My vision was to tie the blockchain for user verification with an in game crypto currency and have content creation driven primarily by the players. The idea was have the crypto encourage miners to verify player accounts and content creators to profit from their work.
Distributed computing was also an idea, I thought it would be cool to have a physx style toolkit that would be driven by THE POWER OF THE CLOUD
Aiden Ross
This is actually a nice idea, I hope you won't bail out and carry on with this.
Parker Hernandez
>MUD Nice! Set an IRC chat or something.
Samuel Thomas
Anyone still here? I’ll make an IRC channel if so, looks like OP gonna bail
David Gutierrez
#Sup Forumsame on irc.rizon.net if there’s interest in making this
Aiden Cook
OP here
So, I'm currently reading a paper on Huntercoin, and basically the way they do it is to represent update packets as transactions on the game ledger. So the procedure for solving blocks actually implements and reconciles the game logic. Very, very interesting stuff.
Full disclosure? I already have a game concept I'm (sort of) developing with this. But if an open blockchain game server framework were collaborated on, any number of Sup Forumsentlemanly projecrs could benefit from it, could they not?
Logan Edwards
Good
James Morris
I am very interested, but sadly I'm a brainlet and my specialties lie in logo making
Levi Adams
Its not totally what you're talking about, but theres a project called decentraland which is kind of like second life, except you mine crypto for plots of land. Still in early stages though, despite how the roadmap may make it seem. >decentraland.org
Owen Howard
I'll make the logo.
Wyatt Barnes
Here are your big problems: asymmetric upload bandwidth.
The big MMO problem is O(n2) scalability for people in the same place - and people playing massively multiplayer games really like to gather in the same place because that's the point. Because a lot of people don't have a lot of upload, even if you distribute all those updates equally, you'll hit a wall much sooner than otherwise and you'll need to find some way to handle the differences.
You also have the cheating problem, but everyone could check everyone else's transactions - but again, not only scalability limited by upload but CPU. Bitcoin handles maybe 3 transactions per second globally.
Distributed transaction ledgers ("blockchains") are the worst possible solution to any problem. Only when no other solution exists should they be considered, but in lots of other cases they won't solve the problem either.
Oliver Diaz
>Bitcoin handles maybe 3 transactions per second globally.
This is why each shard/town hub/other gameworld would need to be its own sidechain, alongside other optimizations like game channels. I'm talking out my ass here but the lead developer of Huntercoin wrote a paper on decentralized games, which I'll likely bump the thread with later. It explains the ideas pretty well.
Adam Moore
Can't you take the PennMUSH code and build from there?
>shame no one seems to be interested Because there's nothing here. OP is assuming that compute resources are valuable for having been used - "compute to play" - when payment is so the developers of the assets can eat and they can't eat CPU cycles spent on verification. That's a pure expense; nobody wins.
