Message from: SW4GN3R
Hi ,
In light of recent growing frustrations with the performance of SAGE Labs onchain mechanics, I wanted to take a moment to address here publicly some recurring community questions about any concerns we have as a team about the long term viability of “fully onchain gaming,” as well as communicate some of the possible solutions we are, and have been, considering. I’ll preface by emphasizing that there is no silver bullet, and that every potential solution comes with trade-offs. There is also no immediate solution we can implement. However, we have experienced these spikes in user activity on Solana in the past during periods of high volatility, and they tend to subside when things stabilize for a while, leading to better game performance and lower fees. But as we’ve seen Solana grow in popularity, there is no reason to expect we won’t face similar issues going forward.
So, for full clarity, I’m going to be focusing this post on two issues:
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- Transaction Settlement Reliability: do the actions you take in game settle onchain? (on the first attempt!)
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- Transaction Fee Impact: how much do you have to pay in SOL to play? (can users play profitably?)
In responding to these questions, I need to talk a little bit about why we’re even building game logic onchain in the first place, as well as the core ethos/philosophy of ATMTA in building Star Atlas. The entire concept of Star Atlas centers on this idea of a globally accessible, open, permissionless, and decentralized open world space adventure MMO (and metaverse integration). That’s a whole lot of crypto buzzwords, but it’s something I feel deeply passionate about (as does the team). If we’re truly going to accomplish building a cybernation with a self sustaining, global and borderless economy, managed by a new political system and set of rules (the DAO), Star Atlas needs to be censorship resistant. It can’t just run on ATMTA servers in the long run. And while it is going to take tremendous effort to accomplish that goal, building game logic via smart contracts (onchain programs) is arguably the first step towards decentralization of the Star Atlas universe.
There are other benefits to building onchain, such as composability and extensibility. This simply means that other developers, whether that be organized teams or individual contributors, can build out applications that integrate with Star Atlas seamlessly. Which is why we created https://build.staratlas.com, to help facilitate this co-creation of Star Atlas. And we’ve seen a number of incredible applications come from it: SLY Tools, ATOM (up-and-coming), EveEye, Aephia dashboards, many others, and many more to come. And this extends to entrepreneurs leveraging the open Intellectual Property policy, enabling non-ATMTA companies to form and monetize products using Star Atlas IP (e.g. Galia Merchants). And finally, onchain logic in many ways makes our backend systems more secure and reliable. I’ll post a little excerpt here from Jacob, our co-founder and CTO, about some of these benefits:
“`It’s hard to fully express how awesome it is from an engineering & security perspective having the fully on-chain game systems. Many MMO projects struggle for years to solve problems that are solved for us by default by building fully on-chain, particularly related to data security & authorizing user actions.
-Jacob Floyd“`
In a nutshell, that’s the “why” we’re building our architecture the way that we are. And we have no intentions of changing that. We set out to build a world-changing MMO, and this blockchain integration is an integral part of that vision.
Which leads to the question of, what are we going to do to improve the user experience. Fortunately, this topic is something we have been considering for the better part of a year. Though it hasn’t really been a pressing or prioritized challenge to solve until more recently. And we do intend to future proof Star Atlas.
Discord message link – https://discord.com/channels/789226204980707409/799478132993425429/1327130366494113854