Dual Universe has been in open beta for 11 days now. They've demoed before, but now it's live. It's a big open world.They have a solar system with 12 planets of moderate size, on which users can build. It's apparently seamless. How do they do that? Anyone know?

The graphics tech isn't that different to something like No Man's Sky or Space Engineers - it's mostly a pretty standard dual-contouring voxel engine with a bunch of pre-made 3D modelled "blocks” to add a little flavour. You can mine quite a bit of info from the older videos on their youtube channel (also the tech was less polished back then, and it's easier to see the LoD transitions in the terrain and such).

There will be some fun around storing the vast number of voxel edits (although it appears those can only be made near points of interest). But I'd hazard a guess that most of the challenge is in managing region-of-interest and keeping updates under control in those big hundred player battles. It'll be interesting to see how many players you can actually stack in one place before either everything goes to hell, or they start dynamically instancing - that's usually the achilles heel of “single-shard” MMOs.

swiftcoder said:

There will be some fun around storing the vast number of voxel edits (although it appears those can only be made near points of interest).

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It'll be interesting to see how many players you can actually stack in one place before either everything goes to hell, or they start dynamically instancing - that's usually the achilles heel of “single-shard” MMOs.

Yes. I'm waiting to see how that plays out. Initially, you can only build near your base, but I think you can expand, join with others, build cities, etc. Filling up the planet is allowed. As that happens we'll see how good their scaling system is.

Open World is most of the time a case of how efficient your data streaming is rather than the graphics power. We have technologies like QuadTrees, LODs and dynamic mesh generation for at least 18 years now (and this is a whole century in computer tech). My first game was The Elder Scrolls 3 that I played with such an open world characteristic. But those games have all a major issue when there are leaks in data streaming content from HDD into memory, this is the real bottleneck a good engine has to solve and scale the content.

I remember a bunch of engines like ID Tech, which had texture issues or Bethesda's Creation Engine used for TES Skyrim, which may set the player into a dead area when streaming fails to load. However, doing this in an online MMO environment is complexity^2 depending on how their game is developed on the server side