How SpatialOS can bring massive worlds to VR
Thousands of room-scale VR players all in the same MMO will take server magic, and SpatialOS may just be that magic.
How to build Planetside in VR:
It starts simple, a play test with 1000 VR players simultaneously on the same map, all with health bars, hit boxes, and simple weapons. Make sure the network can handle it to a playable degree and track all those objects. SpatialOS touts the ability to do this on their website. The tour page states, “An unlimited number of players can connect to [a] continuous game world with an area of a square kilometer.” And tools like VRTK make simple VR games a breeze to build.
“An unlimited number of players can connect to [a] continuous game world with an area of a square kilometer.”
A giant town square with thousands of avatars in one place.
The first iteration is just massive VR player tracking over huge distances. From there you can start adding features, but first you need to prove out the networking capabilities. Once you do, you can move on to adding features and recreating a game like Planetside.
Just as a pancake (2D) MMO can use Spatial OS to track large numbers of physics objects and players, the same technology can track the hands and heads of all VR players simultaneously. As well as track projectiles and physics objects.
Once you have player tracking, it is a matter of applying game mechanics such as control points, spawn points, and weapon classes. It doesn't need to be extremely complex for the first prototypes. The idea of 1000 players all on the same battlefield could be attractive enough for the current population of early adopter VR players eager to try the next big thing in VR.
There are battlegrounds copycats in VR, like STANDOUT, attempting to place 30+ players on a single battle field.
For the design of a VR MMOFPS, we can look directly to Planetside, Battlefield, WWIIOnline, and others. A territory control point latticework may be the quickest and dirtiest means to get a game up and running. Reset the map once every week perhaps, on Tuesdays during server maintenance. That way every week gives a chance for new players to feel impactful, and current players to provide feedback for the dev cycle.
Let’s use VR to revitalize the genre of MMOFPS.
We need a single large scale map where a thousand or more players can be duking it out at once, not 32 player instances. Massive battles where hundreds of players are in the near vicinity of each other should be possible with SpatialOS.
The MMOFPS genre has been explored in 2D games today, as well as in fiction such as the anime Sword Art Online. In season 2, the main characters play a game called Gun Gale Online, an MMOFPS that includes a large central city, massive landscapes for PvE, and a battlegrounds style tournament like today’s PUBG.
If anyone reading this has experience with SpatialOS, I would love to hear your opinion on the plausibility of a massive multiplayer VR game.
The VR community is still small, so questions of a sustainable player base are of concern. But, if we assume a 1 year to prototype development cycle, that gives 1 year for another wave of VR users to come on board. If we assume 3 years to launch then we are left with a huge opportunity if VR continues to grow. Assuming market growth in VR, now seems like the perfect time to start work on a MMO-FPS for VR.
If you think the idea is outrageous, lets hear it! The more discussions we have about VR development and design, the better we can build the metaverse.
