There are many difficulties for those building the metaverse, with onboarding being the usual candidate we discuss. However, one of the most technically challenging barriers is having high concurrent players in the same digital space with a semblance of graphical fidelity, let alone Unreal Engine 5. This is where MetaGravity comes in and they are teaming with Star Atlas for exactly that purpose.
I have a document of articles I want to write and one that has crept to the top in recent months is about MetaGravity. MetaGravity is one of the companies alongside the likes of Improbable (and to an extent, GeForce) that is trying to solve the multi-decade problem of high concurrent users in a single space.
If you have ever played a popular MMORPG and attended any sort of event, you will know the chaos this causes. From World of Warcraft to Planetside 2 to Eve Online, I have been in a single digital world with hundreds of players and the game becomes wholly unplayable. If we’re having that issue with low hundreds of players, how would we cater to thousands? One element of the metaverse is meant to be the accommodation of many people or players, such as at a concert or event. If we don’t want the metaverse to feel like a “dead mall” we need some heavy-duty tech innovation.
MetaGravity and Star Atlas: 30,000+ Concurrent Players
I would put forward the case that Star Atlas is in the top 3 most ambitious metaverse projects in existence. Not only is it beautiful, using Unreal Engine 5 to pursue realism as opposed to a stylized, less demanding aesthetic, but it’s pioneering technologies left, right, and center. If you’re looking for a game that is truly “next-gen”, then Star Atlas deserves a place in the conversation.
The latest area of innovation for Star Atlas — as the title of this article suggests — has been a concurrent player limitation. MetaGravity is a company building a scalable, decentralized infrastructure for exactly that purpose and has teamed with Star Atlas to implement it.
At MetaGravity, we pride ourselves on our pragmatic approach to the challenges faced by the gaming industry. We are united with Star Atlas in the vision to create the next generation of standards that will level up gameplay and the experience of digital worlds for players.
Our industry-beating cost-efficient infrastructure solution can support tens of thousands of players in a single simulation and integrates seamlessly with Unreal UE5, enabling Star Atlas game developers a robust, high-performance deployment onto our infrastructure effortlessly.
As early pioneers of our next-generation infrastructure, Star Atlas receives dedicated support from our team of network engineers and Unreal developers throughout the initial integration phase.
— Rashid Mansoor, Founder and CEO of MetaGravity
The first fruits of this unison came in the form of a “successful 5,000-player stress test in a persistent, single non-instanced environment using advanced interactive bots, shown at the Solana PlayGG Game Festival in San Diego.” That number looks set to increase several times over as the new aim is for 30,000 concurrent players!
I will be keeping a close eye on this story; without pioneers like Star Atlas and MetaGravity teaming up, the metaverse is nothing more than a pipedream.
