Unease about SpatialOS
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With the recent news of Chronicles of Elyria dropping SpatialOS and rumours of Worlds Adrift suffering from lag potentially caused by it, are Dynamight still confident in their adoption of SpatialOS? Do you believe you will be able to avoid the troubles other developers seem to have?
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Chronicles of Elyria had (or at least announced) other reasons to drop SpatialOS, namely their need for a massive persistent world and the resulting cost associated with an incredible amount of AI constantly working. That's not the case for Fractured.
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Well, in Fractured it seems like the environment matters quite a bit. SpatialOS will enable components to synchronize across the system and update the states of the game, so it does sound like a sound pick. However, I've also heard a lot of complaints about spatialOS (especially how it sucks for VR) myself. Might just have to wait for them to put out some content before judging.
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I'm sure they closely follow all info about SpatialOS and if at any point they'll decide it's unfit for them and they cannot overcome the problem they'll drop it. For now it seems like a good choice so no point in worrying about it
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Short answer? Yes. Long answer? Prometheus talked about this on the MMORPG subreddit. I shall quote his post here.
As the CEO of Dynamight Studios - the company working on Fractured, also based on SpatialOS - I feel compelled to chime in this discussion.
For us, SpatialOS has been working out extremely well so far. We've picked it as our engine of choice in February 2017, and we started developing Alpha 1 for Fractured in August, so I can say we've have quite some experience with it. I can give you a quick overlook on the pros and cons of SpatialOS from our perspective.
Pros
- It integrates easily with existing game engines, particularly Unity - which was our choice.
- It allows you to do all the things they claim - in particular, creating a large, seamless world, with a gazillion of entities in it, pushing a lot of physics. It's scalable, and load-balancing works well.
- They provide hosting and distribution of the game too.
- They keep releasing updates - it's so much better now than it was, say, 8 months ago.
Cons
- It's relatively new and you can feel it: bugs and various issues still exist.
- It's relatively new and you can feel it 2: documentation is not where it should be yet.
- The fact you can use all that backend power doesn't mean you shouldn't optimize.
How it's been for us
A blessing! It's literally a blessing for an indie team with limited resources.
Sure, it can't do everything - like the post says, you have to make an authentication system yourself, plus ways to handle all the non-spatial systems and information. Authentication is trivial though, and Fractured doesn't have a lot of global information to handle. Moreover, we could fit our whole AI system (and likely others systems the CoE post doesn't mention) into SpatialOS workers.
In the end, there's one thing the Caspian himself said in his post that many seem to have ignored:
Their technology is still an extremely powerful solution for virtually all distributed simulations out there. But for our particular technology choices and game mechanics, it just wasn’t the ideal solution.
TL;DR
The fact SpatialOS wasn't a good fit for CoE doesn't mean it's "full of s...", "not delivering what it promises" and other claims I've read. It's a very powerful platform, with some issues related to its young age but constantly improving, and working out really well for other projects - including ours, Fractured.
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I think the team has made his thoughts very well.
Just one point i was wondering, if they (CoE) say the SpatialOS has some issues with a massive persistent world, how it will handle the sandbox part in Fractured?
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So once again it turns out that cool technology isn't magic, there's no such thing as a perfect silver bullet, everything has a downside, and "best practice" is relative to context.
More people need to internalize these four ignoble truths.
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@kairosval said in Unease about SpatialOS:
there's no such thing as a perfect silver bullet
How can you say that? What about this?
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@tulukaruk said in Unease about SpatialOS:
@kairosval said in Unease about SpatialOS:
there's no such thing as a perfect silver bullet
How can you say that? What about this?
Oh good. Another entry for the stack of books/movies/games that I'll never have the time to read/watch/play.
