In this episode, we recap the latest news of Star Atlas from the past week.
We are looking for guests to be on our podcast. The podcast is a discussion of the past week’s news about Star Atlas. If you are interested in being on the podcast, please contact us.
We are launching a Star Atlas merch store. Please check it out at Intergalactic Gear.
We are creating a “non-guild” guild. If you are interested in learning more, please go to Intergalactic Coalition.
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Podcast Transcript
[00:00:00] Hi, this is Matt with Intergalactic Herald. Welcome to my Star Atlas Week in Review podcast. This is podcast number 47. If you’re interested in any of the articles or videos I may mention, please go to intergalacticherald. com and look for news recap number 96 for those links. So just a quick Preview of what talk about today.
[00:00:20] A couple of the content pieces AFIA one of the Star Atlas guilds published our newsletter and there’s some interesting bits in there about different things that were happening in Star Atlas. Noticed a tweet from Michael Wegner, the CEO of Star Atlas that I’ll go over. There was an Atlas brew this week that occurred during the Star Atlas stress test of the UE5 version.
[00:00:43] So I’ll kind of during the Atlas brew they actually had the CEO of MetaGravity. on who’s providing the network, I guess, infrastructure for Star Atlas. So talk about that, and then we’ll talk about a little bit of the stress test itself, and then just a couple final thoughts. So, so before I get started with going over the content, I just wanted to mention a few things.
[00:01:03] One, if I’m definitely looking for podcast guests. So if you’re a Star Atlas community member, content creator, builder, Star Atlas employee love to have you on the podcast. We can either talk about the week in review of the news or do an interview. So different options there and just wanted to promote two of my own Star Atlas projects.
[00:01:22] Well, one, obviously the. Intergalactic Herald, so news recaps and guides and directories of Star Atlas resources. But the other one is Intergalactic Gear, so intergalacticgear. com. That’s a Star Atlas merch store. I’m slowly, and I emphasize the word slowly, trying to get out. But I do have a survey up there.
[00:01:41] I’d love for any feedback you’re willing to give me on different merchandise, merch, that you may be interested in purchasing. So, greatly appreciate anyone who has the time to fill that survey out. And then the other Star Atlas project I have is called Intergalactic Coalition. This is my non guild guild.
[00:01:58] So basically it’s a community of Star Atlas gamers who are not necessarily looking to join a guild, but yet still want to kind of hang out with people. In a you know, closed community. So not the open Star Atlas Discord server. It is a paid community, partly to offset the costs of the software unlike Discord, which again is sort of more of the chat interface.
[00:02:20] This one is more about threaded discussions and email notifications along with other features, but it is a paid platform. So I will be asking small membership. fee basically to join. So you can learn more about that. And if you’re interested, I have an interest survey up on intergalacticcoalition.
[00:02:38] com. So please check that out. If that sounds like something you might be interested in joining, love to have you in the community. So let’s go ahead and get into the content section. So first AFIA, I believe Funcracker One of the guild leaders there produces their weekly Star Atlas newsletter.
[00:02:53] So they’re back from the Winter break because of course the team wasn’t there. So there wasn’t a lot of news from the team So it was kind of catching up on that. But one thing I did find So if you go to intergalacticherald. com and look for news recap number 96 you’ll find a link to the AFIA newsletter or if you just go to AFIA.
[00:03:14] com I’m sure they have a link there to their newsletter. It was actually a newsletter of 112 But one thing that struck me was an item that he mentioned about fail, failed transaction due to a busy blockchain. And in this case, of course, we’re talking about the Solana blockchain, but actually, it’s funny because I’ve had failed transactions before, but didn’t really think much of it and just Submitted again, approved on my ledger, and kind of went over, but apparently this is becoming a bigger and bigger thing and like few of the Star Atlas team members either in interviews or tweets have kind of mentioned that Apparently Solana is busy.
[00:03:52] Again, I’m not a blockchain expert by any stretch, but I thought Solana was better I know it’s cheaper for the transaction fees or Gas fees, I guess if you’re using the, the Ethereum slash Bitcoin terms. I get, yeah, I don’t know what they mean, but you know, every transaction on a blockchain apparently costs some money.
[00:04:16] So I, I thought Solana didn’t have these issues, but I don’t know if they’re going through growing pains or whatever. But it kind of made me really start thinking about Is this going to actually affect Star Atlas gameplay, because if I’m doing something and I have to approve it on the blockchain and it fails well, my game is impacted and that doesn’t sound good.
[00:04:38] So again, I don’t know if this is just Solana growing pains, if this is Star Atlas, but again, it just kind of really reminded me again how As much as the aspect of being a quote unquote a blockchain game is cool, you know, we can own our own assets and all that We’re totally as gamers Dependent upon not the game developer Like they didn’t buy enough servers or they didn’t pay enough for internet bandwidth or something like that that they’re really dependent upon Solana, and so if Solana’s down, our game’s down.
[00:05:10] If Solana’s slow, our game’s slow. So, again, we’re early, I’m, I’m not saying this is like, oh, shouldn’t do blockchain gaming, Web3 gaming’s dead, or anything like that. But, again, it just showed another kind of thing I hadn’t really thought about that you know, we are dependent upon this. The other thing that came up was also kind of in the same vein.
[00:05:28] was about the fees for each kind of transaction that does occur. I think this might have been over in the star atlas gist cord. Anyways, I sometimes just write notes that get me off on tangents. So I’m not sure all this was in the aphia newsletter, but, but again, that is another thing. Every time we want to do something, we have to pay a fee.
[00:05:47] So again, not your traditional one. And I guess the key, unlike Microtransactions, they talk about, you know, in different games. These are fees that go to the blockchain, so nobody’s like making a profit or anything off of this. This is just the cost of IE doing business on Solana, or any blockchain.
[00:06:07] So, I guess my whole little, wrapping this little content part up is Not to forget that again, Star Atlas is a different type of system for gaming. So not just we own our assets there’s potentially an investment play to earn aspect to it that we’re really dependent upon this other platform, Solana, which has potential bottlenecks or performance issues.
[00:06:33] And of course there’s always fees. So anyways but moving into maybe I wrote this before there was a tweet that came out from the CEO. Quote unquote about refactoring code to include priority fees to handle Solana transaction issues. So, again, don’t know what that means, what are priority fees. I vaguely understand refactoring code means make the code better, but again, I’m like, Oh, so that confirms sort of the, the failed transactions due to a busy blockchain might be because of how Star Atlas code is, which again, they’re developing.
[00:07:11] So that’s, that’s not at all a downside, but what are priority fees? Do we have to pay more money for this? Again, just again, wondering again, is this just a lot of growing pains or is this actually more going to be a long term? Issue with blockchain gaming in general, not just Star Atlas, but in general.
[00:07:31] So on Wednesday, there were actually two simultaneous events. One was the stress test for the meta gravity portion of the UE5 showroom, and I’ll get to that in a second, but during the Atlas Brew, the MetaGravity CEO actually was on the brew answering questions. So forget the gentleman’s name, but he was actually also on the Star Atlas presentation during the Solana Breakpoint months back, late last year.
[00:08:01] So I kind of, Man, I can’t remember. I watched some content creator who’s either Beyond the Horizon or Metaverse Explorer who replayed the that presentation from the Solana Breakpoint one. So it was refreshed on that, but it was really nice hearing the, the CEO Talk and answer questions from the, the Star Atlas team that was there in the Atlas group.
[00:08:20] So one thing that we came again very interesting and I obviously I have a, without realizing a theme of all these content pieces that caught my attention today, was I was realizing at least for the UE5 game, Metagravity is required basically to build the Star Atlas game we’ve been thinking of.
[00:08:37] So just a real brief thing if you haven’t heard of Metagravity or whatever. And he, he the CO on the Atlas crew did a great job refreshing what, what they do and what they provide. But in a nutshell, MetaGravity is providing the networking. So to put it back in the old, old days, there was games and then, I don’t remember if it was Doom.
[00:09:00] I think it was Doom. I don’t know. Anyways then games, computer games, PC games had the ability to work across the land. So local area network for. Dating myself for sure. And that was revolutionary, where you can actually play with your friends. But of course you had to have all the computers in the same room, connected via network cables and network switches or hubs.
[00:09:20] That was, that was awesome. And again, dating myself. LAN parties existed where people drug their CRT monitors and big beige computer boxes and did it. And they still I think somewhere exists today, at least one of the gaming conferences I went to four or five years ago still had kind of a LAN party aspect to it.
[00:09:39] But anyways, and then eventually that morphed into online gameplay and that’s of course what we have today, both on PC and console. So, but what I really realized, and I hadn’t up until this point, is that the MetaGravity technology really is what’s allowing the networking capability of, Star Atlas, at least the UE5 showroom.
[00:10:04] So without their technology, you’re in the current single player showroom and that’s it. That’s as far as it goes. So now again, I believe the showroom has some sort of multiplayer in there. I, again, I’m, as I mentioned many times, I’m unfortunately just don’t have the time to go into that and Sage, but I think there’s some sort of Multiplayer option within the current showroom version, but what MetaGravity is providing is definitely the internet scalable, all that kind of stuff.
[00:10:36] So, really, again, realizing that Metagravity is a really critical thing. If Solana is the foundation for the, the blockchain identity and ownership of assets, Metagravity is the only way we’re going to be able to play together. Now, having said all of that, what was really interesting that, again, not realizing the technology, I, I just assume with LAN parties and now with the Internet that this is common knowledge, how the Internet Computer games, PC games, for sure.
[00:11:05] Yeah, I just assumed this is done. It’s not a big deal. Apparently it’s a really big deal. And so, one of the things he was mentioning is there, and again, I won’t try to go into the technical I can’t remember what he called it. Spatial networking versus causation. I, again, I’m not going to even remember.
[00:11:24] Big words, or not big words, but big concepts. But he was saying that games like Fortnite actually only can have 100 people. And that’s actually extreme. A lot of other ones like World of Warcraft would do different. You felt like you were in the same world, but you actually weren’t with everybody. And there was different servers and all that.
[00:11:39] I mean, this guy sounds like he totally knows from the technical aspect what he’s talking about. So. And I’ll get to it in a second, but so there was, I think, 150 people in the stress test and they had, which is apparently a big deal. I mean, Fortnite, massive game, tops out at 100, and we got 150, so, bigger.
[00:11:59] But again, here we are today, they have done some non human scalability tests, and have ramped it up to tens of thousands, like, I’m pretty sure he said 30, 000 bots running around, using their technology. So, Yeah. Obviously that’s a big deal. And again, I guess I just assumed this was a known commodity, just like you can buy a gaming engine or use a gaming engine, like unreal engine.
[00:12:23] These are just givens apparently not. So getting much more impressed by all this. One other thing he had mentioned again, I know I’m combining cause the stress test was going on during the Atlas brew, but that the stress test was actually built on AWS, Amazon web services. And, yeah. Where I wasn’t 100 percent sure was like is Metagravity providing the servers, or is Star Atlas providing the servers?
[00:12:49] Because he at one point talked about, well, you have to buy servers to run stress tests. So, again, I wasn’t 100 percent sure, but the bigger takeaway from all of that is, We’ve been talking about Star Atlas as a blockchain game, and everything’s on the blockchain. And it’s decentralized. Well, that’s not true.
[00:13:10] If MetaGravity didn’t exist, and these servers on Amazon Web Services, which is not a blockchain how is this any different than, again, Fortnite, or Xbox Live, or PlayStation Network? We’re not decentralized. Now again, I’m not saying there’s not multiple servers, there’s not other ways that this is done, but what I’m, guess I’m trying to Get my head around is, yeah, but if that cluster of servers that is paid for by MetaGravity or Star Atlas goes down, our game goes down.
[00:13:40] So it’s, it’s not distributed. It’s not actually truly on the blockchain. It’s on these servers, which again makes much more sense. Unreal Engine and, I mean, you always hear about these massive multi, MMOs, massive multiplayer online, having servers and there’s a server issue and whatever. And I’m like, oh, well, we’re on the blockchain.
[00:14:00] But we’re not so again, I’m not sure I really understand all these nuances and to be honest, I don’t care I want to play a game But again when I hear some phrases and now I hear get other information like wait are anyway So I think we’re still a blockchain game for your player profile for your assets and all that but the actual gameplay at least again in the Unreal Engine is traditional server farms and bullets flying and computational power and all of this stuff.
[00:14:35] So, in other words, The blockchain is cool, gives us some stuff, but you could take away the blockchain and still have a really cool game. You just aren’t a blockchain game. So, again, not, not pro or con, just more of like, hmm, interesting. And then the last couple things didn’t realize Metagravity itself was building their own game.
[00:14:55] Totally sounds cool and makes sense. So that just kind of interesting. So they’re not just a networking company. They’re a networking company that wants to build their own game too. So, but where I really left this whole part of the Atlas brew was again, realizing that for all intents and purposes, MetaGravity is providing the networking backbone for us to have a Star Atlas Metaverse.
[00:15:15] So, The success of MetaGravity really starts to sound like the only way that Star Atlas is going to have success. Right or wrong there, but again, we’ll kind of put that on hold and that kind of will be my wrap up on that. So let’s go ahead and move into the stress test. So it was announced on Twitter and all the, well, I guess Twitter that the Star Atlas was going to come up with a new version of the show.
[00:15:41] release it and there’d be some sort of functionality that will allow for this thousand person stress test. So cool. Awesome. Except they were doing it for a 24 hour period, but it was on Wednesday. And again, I realize we have an international game, gamer group in Star Atlas, so I don’t know exactly when, but just It was Wednesday for me in the in the United States.
[00:16:08] Now just a quick Why Wednesday? Why not the weekend? I don’t I don’t know. I didn’t really look and it didn’t matter cuz but I It was a non starter for me. I just couldn’t take off Working at my business to do that. But anyway, so Okay. That’s moving on. But one cool thing is the got some press.
[00:16:29] So decrypt. com or an article about why they’re doing this test. So again, that’ll be in the latest news recap, number 96 on intergalactic Carol, if you want to see that article So putting all that aside, I have to admit it was pretty cool and pretty interesting to see that they were going to have a stress test because I think that’s great.
[00:16:46] Community likes to help out. Obviously this one’s not like beta testing, some new feature, or sorry, it’s not beta testing a new economic loop or something like that. It’s just like, Hey, a whole bunch of people get together. Oh, and found or in the outro was through the CEO of Metagrab, and I said, the one reason in addition to testing, they’ve done bot tests, but.
[00:17:04] You have to design a bot and you have to give it AI so like it doesn’t hit walls and that takes more computational power. It takes more time to build that AI where humans know not to run into walls. And it was so obvious when he said it, but yeah, I mean, it’s cheaper to do tests with people than it is to do it with your own bots.
[00:17:24] Yeah, duh. So anyway, so we’re the guinea pigs, which is great. It sounds like they only topped out at 155. It sounds like there were lots of crashing. Star Atlas TV actually posted, I think, a three or four hour chunk of time. And, you know, I was just listening while I was doing some errands, or tours today.
[00:17:38] And it’s kind of weird to listen to people just chat in the past. But again, it sounds like there was lots of crashing and things like that. But again, it was a test. It was the first test. So, you know, none of those things. Are a downside, but I do have to admit, even though I mentioned that 150 seems like a big deal for comparing to things like fortnight 150 when they were proposing a thousand person stress test doesn’t sound that good, but I think there again, there was some Some issue or some reasons for that one, if it was during the weekend weekday, how many people are available given the scope of the Stardust community being international, I mean, yeah.
[00:18:17] Some people are sleeping while they’re awake, so, you know, maybe that isn’t the best. I’ve been kind of always wondering How many people actually have enough gear, PCs, video cards to actually run, run the UE5 version? Was this an indication that maybe there was not that many? Again, don’t know. The only really downside I realized, and I sure hope this isn’t the case, but is our Stardust community actually smaller than we think it is?
[00:18:43] Again, if you look at the number of people on Discord, it seems to be a lot larger than I forget what the total number of signups on the starless discord are. So again, maybe it was just a timing issue. But again, These are things I think about just throwing them out and not making these as negative criticisms or anything.
[00:19:00] But anyways, but again, regardless of all those things I think it was actually putting that plus the CEO interview really made it seem like, wow, this is really cool. And a lot of people who are in the chat that I was listening to after the fact, we’re just talking about how cool it is. Cool was to see all the characters running around.
[00:19:17] And apparently there was some I think somebody said it was a bug that if you got close to somebody, you automatically shot them or something. Not a feature. Again, I, again, I wasn’t playing. So I’m just getting these little snippets, but it was cool watching after the fact, seeing the video, seeing dozens and dozens, maybe up to a hundred.
[00:19:36] They were trying to take a photo in front of the showroom and to see. That, as the, the foundational part of this universe, this metaverse, this gigantic space game that we’re all excited to see eventually. I have to admit that, that was kind of cool. It, it, it leaves, it, it, it was a different feeling than when you see different versions of Sage and even the 3D part.
[00:20:01] Even the ships moving around, which is kind of cool, you know, seeing all these ships moving on the blockchain. And maybe it just comes from, The fact that the, the 2D slash 3D blockchain real time strategy games the, the aspect of seeing people running around accidentally killing each other if they got too close, it, it, it, it is what internet gaming is today, and so to actually see that in a game you’re interested in, again, it was really cool.
[00:20:30] So again, all my little, you know, critical, Constructive just, you know, whatever’s it was pretty cool to see all that kind of stuff. So just wrapping all this up. So kind of some of the final thoughts and again, it was something that I think, I think the CEO metagrad we said, but it really kind of hit home.
[00:20:49] So there’s been two kind of themes of this last week, at least to me. One was how dependent star Atlas is on other. platforms or services. So obviously epic games, which is the maker of the unreal engine. But again, a lot of people develop on unreal edge and that’s not unique dependency. So on itself, yes, that’s new.
[00:21:07] But again, there are other blockchain games. So again, just it’s new blockchain gaming, but stylus isn’t doing anything different. Meta gravity definitely really depended upon it. But again, I’m sure, and again, it sounds like Metagravity wants to work with other partners too. So again, they’re coming up with a unique technology and that’s not a downside, especially if it allows for scalability that never existed.
[00:21:32] And we’re talking Fortnite, major game developers. Makes me wonder, like, how many people can play Halo and Bungie. Sorry, PC. That’s, that’s different. That’s Microsoft. But you know, the, the Shall we say the non console space is how large they’re World of Warcraft. That’s a, that’s probably a better example and, but again, apparently they have a technology that MetaGravity is trying to do a completely different one that sounds like, yeah, this is the only way to get these large spaces to exist.
[00:22:00] So, but the, so again, so Stardust is dependent upon all these, but I don’t consider that a negative. If anything, if you kind of Dovetailing with the fact that they’re outsourcing some of the development to other development studios, it really makes you kind of realize, well, they’ve taken a different business approach.
[00:22:19] They have partnered or outsourced the development. I mean, people are doing that a lot today. They don’t build everything. They, they have one company do this. They have one company that maybe they just quote assemble or something like that. You know, Apple doesn’t build an iPhone. There’s a company Foxconn in China that builds physically builds the iPhone.
[00:22:40] So, you know, again, this is not anything. So it just made me. realize that. But on the counter, I’m pretty sure, again, there was a MetaGravity CEO mentioned that Star Citizen is actually building everything themselves. So they’re building their own game engine. Apparently they’re building their own network technology.
[00:22:56] Quoting him, I think he said, yeah, they’re doing the same kind of concept of what everybody else is doing, which means there’ll be smaller groups, more load screens, things like that, which is the best. Doesn’t matter. I mean, it’s just more of. Understanding what it is. I think if we’re honest, the best is either one of two things.
[00:23:14] One, people that actually release something, or they do something that you as a gamer enjoy. Then two. You, it’s the best. So anyway, so yeah, kind of an interesting week of not really you know, traditional Star Atlas news, but nevertheless, I think a lot of actual interesting things with the stress test, learning more about metagravity, maybe suffering some of the Solana Issues and how, you know, all this relates is now we’re getting way beyond like, is it a game to like, it’s a game.
[00:23:45] Now we’re just seeing it being built in public. So that kind of wraps it up. So thanks for listening to me go on about whatever I found interesting in Star Asset. Star Atlas this past week. Just want to remind you, if you’d like to get links to all the other content creators that I look up to help give me some ideas on what I’d like to talk about on this podcast, please go to intergalacticherald.
[00:24:05] com. Sign up for the news recap there. There’s sign up, you’ll probably get a pop up too and that’s a weekly email where I curate the Stardust contract creators I found interesting, put them in an email newsletter, and send it to you around 5 p. m. Pacific Standard Time. U. S. time, Sunday nights.
[00:24:24] Also do got two Star Atlas projects I’m working on. One is a Star Atlas merch store at intergalacticgear. com, so please go to intergalacticgear. com. Fill out my merch survey, greatly appreciate it. Pop your email in there, put you on my future mailing list where you’ll get updates on how the merch store is coming.
[00:24:43] I’m sure I’ll put promo codes and things like that in there. And then if you are a gamer, like myself, and not really interested in joining the Star Atlas Guild, not that there’s anything wrong with Star Atlas Guilds please go to intergalacticcoalition. com and fill out the interest survey. Once I get enough people that are interested.
[00:25:01] We should be able to launch that community to give us a place to kind of hang out hopefully much smaller, more focused conversations. You can come in and out, get emails about topics you want to follow and well, really not get inundated with hundreds, if not thousands, I guess, not thousands, but hundreds of chat messages a day and not really know what’s going on.
[00:25:20] So intergalactic coalition. com. If you’re interested in that, other than that, thanks for listening. Again, this is Matt with Intergalactic Herald. Have a great week ahead.