Can anyone explain to me what it actually is? Everything I've read about it is through this sort of know-nothing journalistic filter.
They often focus on the "kill a monster and it stays dead" angle, so that seems like a real aspect of the system, but it's not an advance. Other companies have aimed at this "persistent virtual world-building toolkit" target before, from Second Life to Blue Mars to Metaverse to Metaplace. What distinguishes Improbable from these other ideas?
Yes, Second Life has one persistent world ("one shard") but it's composed of a bunch of "sims" glued together at sim boundaries. (A "sim" is a 256 m x 256 m x notsure m volume of space.) The states of the things in that sim are the responsibility of one server; if an object crosses a sim boundary, the new sim may be handled by a different server. The sim-crossing hand-off can cause object motions to look non-physical.
As I understand it, Improbable also simulates one big world, but they map the various simulation calculations to servers in a different way. How exactly? That's their secret sauce.
Philip Rosedale's new startup, High Fidelity, also takes a different approach. See https://highfidelity.com/
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Can anyone explain to me what it actually is? Everything I've read about it is through this sort of know-nothing journalistic filter.
They often focus on the "kill a monster and it stays dead" angle, so that seems like a real aspect of the system, but it's not an advance. Other companies have aimed at this "persistent virtual world-building toolkit" target before, from Second Life to Blue Mars to Metaverse to Metaplace. What distinguishes Improbable from these other ideas?
Yes, Second Life has one persistent world ("one shard") but it's composed of a bunch of "sims" glued together at sim boundaries. (A "sim" is a 256 m x 256 m x notsure m volume of space.) The states of the things in that sim are the responsibility of one server; if an object crosses a sim boundary, the new sim may be handled by a different server. The sim-crossing hand-off can cause object motions to look non-physical.
As I understand it, Improbable also simulates one big world, but they map the various simulation calculations to servers in a different way. How exactly? That's their secret sauce.
Philip Rosedale's new startup, High Fidelity, also takes a different approach. See https://highfidelity.com/