Building Simulated Worlds - Orchestrating Thousands of Unity3D Instances

Explore the technical challenges of creating massive, seamless multiplayer game worlds using Unity3D in this conference talk from Unite Europe 2016. Dive into Improbable's collaboration with Bossa Studios on World's Adrift, an MMO featuring a persistent 150x150km game world with full physics. Learn about distributed systems, Entity-Component-System architecture, and how SpatialOS orchestrates thousands of Unity instances in the cloud. Discover strategies for managing hardware resources, player demands, and content creation challenges. Gain insights into fault-tolerant, self-healing systems, automatic persistence, and the integration of custom workers for specialized tasks. Understand how this approach enables multiplayer functionality by default and overcomes both technical and design hurdles in building large-scale simulated worlds.

Intro
BUILDING SIMULATED WORLDS
HARDWARE & RESOURCES VS PLAYER DEMANDS
Distributed systems are hard.
Content is hard.
Deep and narrow
Broad and shallow
Entity-Component-System
Entities have components
Components have states
Systems handle single component type
Systems update states
Thousands of Unity instances
Managed workers
Fault Tolerant - Self Healing
Persistence by Default
Clients as a worker
Multiplayer by default
Custom Workers
Overcoming both challenges