At an event at VentureBeat, Epic Games CTO Kim Libreri mentioned this issue for the first time. He used the data and network issues required for "Fortnite" sniper shooting to show people the difficulties in building the metaverse.

As the hottest word in recent years, Metaverse (Metaverse) has attracted attention from many industries, and has continued to be popular through astronomical levels of investment and mergers.

However, as the Metaverse became known to more and more people, people began to discuss the possibility of creating a Metaverse and the challenges it faced. However, perhaps the most interesting of the many perspectives is the issue of snipers and the Metaverse.

At an event at VentureBeat, Epic Games CTO Kim Libreri mentioned this issue for the first time. He used the data and network issues required for sniper shooting in "Fortnite " to show people the difficulties in creating the metaverse. .

In the subsequent conversation, founders or senior technical talents from , Intel, , Nvidia, Subspace and Yingyi and other companies talked about the data processing and network latency issues faced in the creation of the Metaverse.

Here is the full text compiled by GameLook:

According to Libreri, the challenge of the Metaverse, as in interconnected virtual universes like Avalanche, the Ready Player One novels, and the Matrix movies, is that it It's a network problem.

Libreri said, "Normally, the way people think of distributing a huge parallel world is to divide it into a grid, and players move from one grid to another in small areas throughout the grid."

In a In racing games, this way of rendering a game world is very good, and it is not difficult to do. The racer will be on one grid and may move to an adjacent grid, but movement in this manner is something that two computers connected to the internet can do. However, being a sniper in a combat game is even harder.

"If you're on top of a mountain and have a powerful sniper rifle, through a magnifying glass, you can see people for miles. In this case you're not just exchanging simple network traffic between these grid locations , you also need to handle rendering from completely different machines."

Game companies have to exchange network data between different players so that their computers can render the correct perspective. Everything the sniper sees must be fully documented, and as the sniper moves through the game environment, the system must record and send its relationship to other moving objects.

Having said this, you may understand why a tactical competitive game like "Fortnite" can only accommodate 100 people competing at the same time. The relative position and movement of each player requires so much data to be collected and then transmitted. To the server, real-time synchronization with all players. If you take away a lot of the computing power required to augment 3D graphics with a virtual reality environment, and then pack those electronics into a wireless, portable compact device like the Facebook Meta Quest 2, you'll find that it can only fit in a single game 16 players, as is the case with games like Population: One VR.

This is not a metaverse.

Now, if you try to allow 1,000 or 100,000 players into the same grid (same server), your network problems will increase exponentially.

Libreri said, "There is so much research that we need to do on the concept of how to handle large-scale distributed gameplay in an infinite world, and I think Tim (Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games) may think that solving For such large-scale parallel simulation gameplay, we may need a new programming language . "

Raph Koster, CEO of Playable Words and the creator of many virtual worlds such as "Star Wars Galaxy", wants to remind people that solving these problems is not possible. not easy. He said that solving network problems for many players in the same space is a huge difficulty.

For example, imagine the minute-to-second timing issues that must be resolved between these players, especially if the person across the stadium is hiding behind a door, or if the players are in different terrain areas.

Latency refers to the interaction delay, or the feedback in the simulation when the user inputs.

A concert is easier to render and synchronize to a large number of players, because you may only see 50 people near you. These dozens of people appear in high-fidelity images and they do not move as frequently as players in fighting games. . Still, it's a challenge, with all these people potentially dancing and doing a lot of movement in the same place.

Improbable CEO Herman Narula said, "We have tried effective solutions to this (sniper) problem."

No one has really solved this problem, but it is something that must be solved on the road to the Internet. Question one, we'll hear about workable solutions from tech talent like Narula.

The problem with large-scale simulations

1. Computing power

The metaverse will be a giant simulation or a large number of simulation settings. As Epyllion's Matthew Ball explains about the metaverse, "Microsoft Flight Simulator" is The most realistic consumer simulation game in gaming history, with 2 trillion individually rendered trees, 1.5 billion buildings and other features, requires 2.5 billion petabytes of data, all of which no single consumer device can store.

You don't really want to try to see these trees up close (doing so will most likely result in a crash), The only way Microsoft can show you this data in real time is by streaming it to you from internet data centers when needed In the computer, the data is transmitted to the player's computer in real time while the game is running.

Microsoft Flight Simulator

While this looks impressive, the trees don't move. You won't see the wind blowing through the trees, they all stay in a grid, and we don't have to worry about suddenly wanting to see the Dubai terrain when you are flying over San Francisco . Now, let's say the sniper is on one of the planes, or you're flying multiple planes at the same time, and then you start needing to synchronize all this data in real time and move with the other machines.

So, you may have figured out that the Metaverse is one of the most difficult computational problems ever solved. Therefore, it is not surprising that Raja Koduri, chief architect of chip manufacturer Intel, predicts that in order to support a metaverse where billions of people interact in real time, we will need 1,000 times more powerful computing power than today. Of course, Koduri wants us all to buy tons of chips, but, as you can see, this is a huge computing and networking problem.

Koster said, "The CPU itself isn't even the biggest challenge, actually, the network is a bigger problem. Because you can store that data, which is how a lot of people try to solve it with concurrency, if there's a man in the forest and they applaud , then fine, you need to send network information to one person."

Koster added, "If there are two people, one clap generates two outgoing claps, and if there are 4 people, that's four transmissions. It gets tricky. If there are 4 people, but I slap your palm, it means that I and you each send the message once, and that is different. The third party needs to see that I slapped your palm. The same network information will increase exponentially. Therefore, when you increase the number of people to 100, more than 1,000 different types of information will be sent out. This will cause concurrency problems.

People are trying to find solutions.Comcast said this week it achieved 4 gigabytes per second of bandwidth (and even 10 Gbps in both directions), and over time it hopes to provide even better bandwidth to all homes.

bandwidth provides higher data throughput, just like adding more lanes on a highway pushes more data over the Internet. Latency refers to the time it takes for a data signal to travel from one point on the Internet to another and back again, which is measured in milliseconds (ms). If lag is severe, fast-action games won't run well. Your frame rate can be reduced to the lowest, or it may be inaccurate when shooting someone. When you aim, the person has actually left. Subspace believes that the company can reduce latency by 80% in 60 countries around the world.

Over the past few years, Subspace has built its own parallel network using network and hardware, either through partnerships with dark fiber providers, or some excess capacity from the Internet. Now, the company is preparing to retire its own network service, which allows developers, such as those of real-time games, to provide real-time connections to users.

founder Bayan Towfiq started working on this problem because the public Internet failed to support applications that required real-time communication, such as games. The internet was never built for real-time interaction and is plagued by issues such as latency, jitter and packet loss, which ultimately impact user engagement.

Subspace deploys a global private network including a dedicated fiber optic backbone, patented Internet weather maps and custom hardware in hundreds of cities. This network pulls traffic close to users on the Internet, ensuring the fastest and most stable channels.

The company said that Subspace allows existing games and Internet applications for the first time to provide a private network for every Internet-connected device without changing the code, VPN client or internal hardware. Subspace service customers have covered hundreds of millions of users. .

Ball has said that the average person will not even notice if the audio is out of sync with the video unless it is 45 milliseconds earlier or 125 milliseconds later (in a 170 millisecond interval). The acceptable range is even wider, between 90 milliseconds early and 185 milliseconds late (with an interval of 275 milliseconds). In terms of digital buttons, such as YouTube's pause button, if we don't see a reaction after 200-250 milliseconds, we will only Think that your click failed.

There are more companies solving the problem of network delay . RP1 hopes to bring 100,000 people to the same scene, so that people can hold huge concerts in the metaverse and hold them in real time.

RP1 chief architect Dean Abramson has said that he believes RP1 can support 100 million users with 2,500 servers, which is 200-500 times more efficient than other companies. This is encouraging, but it may be difficult to actually achieve it. We need to see how it performs when dealing with extremely complex worlds, such as 100 million users, each with a large amount of detail.

Libreri said that developing many ways to distribute computation and data management across cloud infrastructure for the Metaverse is also necessary, and you can see how big the magnitude of this problem is.

Then you are not only faced with the challenge of finding network data between these grids on the map, but also with the challenge of building network data between worlds. In the metaverse we should be able to move quickly between different worlds, the computer now has no idea which world you want to visit, it can't predict what you want to do compared to getting updates in a game world, it can't predict in advance Downloading a world allows you to quickly do so when you decide to visit another world.

How to overcome this? I try to tune from one world to another, but wait, I catch up with my friends later because I have to download 2.5 billion petabytes of data before the next world can load, or at least start streaming, Ball did some calculations on the amount of data needed, but wasn't optimistic.

Nvidia CEOHuang Jenxun recently stated that his company hopes to organize a large number of supercomputers and AI experts to create a world climate model. They hope to create a "digital twin" for the earth that is accurate to meters to predict the earth's climate change. This requires capturing a lot of data, and Koster points out that meter-level detail will be constantly changing, which is difficult to model. But as long as NVIDIA does the modeling, the digital version of the Earth Metaverse simulated in Omniverse will be free and open to others.

Koster said, “As long as the metaverse world you want to explore happens to be what NVIDIA looked like when it took the snapshot of the earth, this is very helpful to you as a game developer. But we all know that a model accurate to the meter level will be in 30 Obsolete in seconds, isn’t it?

So, how do we create the metaverse? My suggestion is, first, take out all the snipers.