Improbable Blog

I'm a Software Engineer at Improbable (http://www.improbable.io). Before this I worked at Google for four years, and before that I ran a small game development studio (http://www.mysterystudio.com) for almost 10 years. Improbable gives me the best of both worlds -- the speed and the impact your day to day work has in a startup, and the world-changing ambitions of Google. I get to work on very challenging technical problems, building core systems from scratch, within an engineering culture and people of a caliber comparable to Google's, but perhaps even more motivated because we're more invested in the success of the company. I'm enjoying every minute of it!

What, they're not mentioning "Metaverse" and "NFT", and they don't have a blockchain? They're missing the hype train. Right now, there's a huge boom in "blockchain metaverses". Search for "metaverse" in News for info. The idea is to have a virtual world in which you can buy scarce land and maybe scarce objects. There are at least a dozen of these things. As virtual worlds, they're awful. The graphics are bad, the worlds are tiny, you can't do much, and nobody goes there. It's all about selling land and "rares". There are at least two such things where they skipped building the virtual world and just sell land on a map. On top of this fluff, there's now a virtual land real estate investment trust. I want to see a good big "metaverse". Right now, 19 year old Second Life is still the best recreational virtual world, despite a lack of forward progress in the last few years from Linden Lab. Roblox is getting steadily better, moving past their blocky origins. IMVU is trying harder. Epic keeps talking up the "metaverse", but all they have shown so far is a level editor for Fortnite. Improbable [1] raised US$400 million to build a back-end system for really big virtual worlds. It even works, more or less. But you have to host on their servers (Google's, actually) and the thing is so expensive to run that the three indy games that used it all went broke. Since they raised too much money, they now have two in-house game studios, which have shipped nothing. [1]…

Improbable | Software Engineer | San Francisco, London | http://www.improbable.io I'm an infrastructure engineer at Improbable. We're building SpatialOS, a distributed operating system that facilitates simulation on an unprecedented scale. We recently raised a huge round lead by SoftBank which is allowing to push the boundaries of virtual world creation, which you can read more about on Wired (http://www.wired.co.uk/article/improbable-quest-to-build-the-matrix) I'm particularly interested in finding people who want to join our new engineering effectiveness team to build tools and define development practices for a rapidly growing organisation. If you're passionate about developer productivity, build systems and designing great APIs for internal usage, reach out to me. A full list of roles is available at https://improbable.io/careers/opportunities If you're interested and want to chat more about Improbable feel free to contact me directly at [email protected]

How does this relate to the technology that Improbable[^0] have built? I gather that their core tech is a massively distributed object graph designed to support the sort of interactions necessary for an MMO game to operate a global instance rather than shard worlds. Improbable seem to have gone a bit... off the rails(?) in recent years, diving into Web3, metaverse, and defence contracting, but I assume the core tech is still there. [^0]: https://www.improbable.io/

Improbable [0] is building (and has open-sourced) Keanu, "a general purpose probabilistic programming library built in Java", where Bayesian networks are represented as DAGs. It's feature list includes Probabilistic Programming Operators and Distributions, Auto-differentiation, Inference, Maximum a posteriori, Metropolis Hastings, Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, Sequential Monte Carlo (Particle Filtering), and Support for Kotlin. [1] [0] https://improbable.io/ [1] https://github.com/improbable-research/keanu

https://improbable.io/ are also working on this, though in a much larger setting, e.g. open worlds, MMOs

Improbable | Software Engineer | San Francisco, London | https://improbable.io I'm a software engineer at Improbable. We're building SpatialOS, a distributed operating system that facilitates simulation on an unprecedented scale. My team is responsible for taking SpatialOS and helping corporations and governments ask huge, "what if" questions of the real world. We're backed by A16Z and partnered with Google (https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/13/improbable-teams-with-goog...). In addition to a wide range of engineering roles in our rapidly growing London office, we've just opened a new office in San Francisco in which we're looking to hire software engineers, community managers and product managers. A full list of roles is available at https://improbable.io/careers/opportunities If you're at all interested, drop me an email at [email protected]

Improbable | London | Visa & Relocation support | ONSITE We are Improbable and we created a new kind of distributed operating system which can power massive scale simulations, we call it SpatialOS - https://improbable.io/. It enables developers to build massive, detailed simulations across thousands of machines in the cloud. It transforms how we look at complex systems in areas as diverse as city management, defence, economics and entertainment, enabling a new class of applications and businesses for the future. ------------------------------------------------------------- We're hiring - https://improbable.io/about/careers: # Senior Software Engineers # Infrastructure Engineers (SRE) # Product Managers ------------------------------------------------------------- If you're interested, please contact [email protected]

I've been using Unity on and off since 2008. All I can say is that the whole day's events were just bizarre. There's this thread on the Unity Forum with close to 500 replies as of now. In the thread are mostly people lashing out at Unity. Mr. Sweeney also linked this thread on twitter saying this thread is "full of highly intelligent indie devs having an insightful debate about engine EULAs and their legal ramifications". I must have a very different set of eyes than Mr. Sweeney here. But the first 200 or so replies were made before Unity could even post a response. They were mostly speculations and mods asking people to calm down and wait for an official response. This is mostly because Improbable's first blog post did not give any specifics and made it sound like Unity pulled the plug overnight (later according to Unity, Improbable knew about the TOS violation for over a year). So then Unity made a response blog post. Improbable made a 2nd blog post. And Epic made their 25mil announcement. Then, that Unity thread has pretty much turned into a conspiracy thread fueled by the f#$@ed up timing of everything. "Highly intelligent" and "insightful debate" would not be my choice words to describe that thread. And lastly, I want to say, even if Mr. Sweeney had all the good intentions, it was really painful to see Epic capitalizing on Unity in such quick manner and intensity. I was actually in agreement with his tweets before he posted the lame thread link and announced the…

I'm glad someone referenced the classic AI of a PacMan Ghost ;) Id's Doom from the early 1990s is another deceptively simple yet surprisingly engaging instance: http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Monster_behavior An agent's set of possible actions is conditioned on its environment, other NPCs as well as the players actions. Even for a finite number of variables you can quickly see how the problem becomes computationally expensive for a single agent. You want to to build unsharded persistent worlds with complex character behaviours and allow millions of online simultaneous players all sharing the same game state? Then you need to take a page from architects building scalable cloud computing infrastructure and applications that serve billions of request per second with low latency. Companies like improbable.io are abstracting game state and logic with SpatialOS. But I think there is still a lot of room here for some startup to combine "Unreal Engine + AWS". Creating a true "cloud native game engine". Even if its just HTML5 based and targeting games such as Slither.io. Quest - An iOS "io" Game from Improbable https://improbable.io/games/blog/quest-an-ios-io-game-from-improbable-…

Improbable | Software Engineer | San Francisco, London | https://improbable.io I'm a software engineer at Improbable. We're building SpatialOS, a distributed operating system that facilitates simulation on an unprecedented scale. My team is responsible for taking SpatialOS and helping corporations and governments ask huge, "what if" questions of the real world. We're backed by A16Z and partnered with Google. In addition to a wide range of engineering roles in our rapidly growing London office, we've just opened a new office in San Francisco where we're building a new analytics team focused on building a distributed analytics platform to let our customers understand how real and virtual worlds operate. Our analytics platform will help customer answer key questions about the simulations they build in verticals as broad as gaming, autonomous vehicles, city simulation and more. A full list of roles is available at https://improbable.io/careers/opportunities If you're at all interested, drop me an email at [email protected]

this is a bit further https://improbable.io/

Improbable | Multiple Software Engineers & Head of Security | Full Time, ONSITE LONDON, UK (http://improbable.io/life-at-improbable/) Improbable is developing an operating environment that makes building simulated worlds possible. Worlds which can be run in real time, simulating the behaviours and interactions of millions of entities. Spaces with their own rules and properties that a multitude of people can simultaneously change, explore and visualise in as many different ways as developers can imagine. We are hiring across multiple teams within the business including: - Building our base real-time distributed simulation platform - Applying our real-time distributed simulation platform to gaming - Building revolutionary new online games backed by our simulation platform - Applying our real-time distributed simulation platform to other verticals Also, Head of Security: We are currently looking to make a critical first security hire around whom we can build a team as we scale. Our codebase is a large-scale, cloud-agnostic, distributed system with a complex combination of Go, JVM technologies and C#. This team will be responsible responsible for auditing the system’s current security architecture and will also be responsible for security design / implementation in future to ensure our data and execution environments are safe. Our current needs surround security auditing, pen-testing, vulnerability testing / research, encryption and authentication with great freedom to…

From the people I've talked to, Epic Games and Riot developers seem to have their shit together as far as being able to scale their backends to millions of players. Improbable too (although they're more of a game services studio), who are the creators of Thanos* * https://www.improbable.io/blog/thanos-prometheus-at-scale)

Before anybody thinks that they need something like this at work, I have seen single node HA Prometheus set ups work at one of the largest CDN's in the country for metrics. Reddit's own Kubernetes infrastructure team uses single node (pod) Promethei as well. [0] If you look all of the components that are required to run Thanos [1], the operational complexity is incredibly high. I know its a shiny tool, that is super cool but please make sure you have an actual need for some of these before devoting resources to them. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/ebxrkp/we_are_the_reddit_… [1] https://improbable.io/blog/thanos-prometheus-at-scale

Just a small correction: Improbable are making a cloud gaming platform, not a game engine. https://improbable.io/games/blog/how-spatialos-works-with-game-engines

If anyone is wondering what Improbable's blog post was https://improbable.io/company/news/2019/01/10/unity-blocks-spatialos

If you are like me wandering what is SpatialOS, from https://improbable.io/games : SpatialOS provides managed cloud services that solve common technical and production challenges when you’re creating, iterating on and hosting multiplayer games. SpatialOS: the cloud platform for real-time multiplayer games, built with any game engine.

Improbable's response: https://improbable.io/company/news/2019/01/10/unity-blocks-spatialos "Worryingly, this change occurred during an open commercial negotiation with the company to find a way to do more together." So they had an ongoing negotiation and Unity just went ahead and made the change? Yikes. Also kudos to Improbable for setting up an emergency fund for partners affected by this.

We took a similar journey with Prometheus @ Improbable. We found federation to have its limits & wanted a global query view as well as a few other nice features: https://improbable.io/games/blog/thanos-prometheus-at-scale

For internal services communication, gRPC is a better option. For backend to web frontend, I will keep REST for a while although is tempting to have a unified system. For example this: https://improbable.io/games/blog/grpc-web-moving-past-restjson-towards…

Very broad question but related: this blog [0] discusses how a modelling product was used to simulate the internet backbone. If your aim is real-time reaction modelling of actors, this could theoretically be implemented using such a system. They have an open beta [1], although building a comprehensive system like that described above seems a very significant task even to a large engineering team. [0] https://improbable.io/2016/03/24/what-we-found-when-we-simulated-the-b… [1] https://spatialos.improbable.io/get-spatialos (Disclaimer: I have interviewed with and accepted an offer by Improbable)

I don't know much about Improbable but from what I've read they shouldn't be viewed as VR firm, simply you could use their technology to create a massive virtual world that you could then explore using VR. I think the media (and maybe Improbable's PR) just likes to go with the VR angle as it's a recognised, understood term The product is 'Spatial OS'. Want to build a massive simulation of various agents interacting in different ways than cannot possibly fit on a single server? That's where 'Spatial OS' comes in. Interesting blog post here: https://improbable.io/2016/03/24/what-we-found-when-we-simulated-the-b… a couple of people from the UK government visit improbable for 3 days, successfully build a detailed simulation of the internet (at the routing level, so simulating all routers involved in BGP). Looks pretty impressive.

thanks for that. I just googled 'Improbable London'. On their website not much substantive , just a standard 'hello world' post: http://improbable.io/blog/ I'm personally interested in such an approach for an academic tasks ( complex electrical simulations), but I have no idea where to find some substantive discussion of what they're doing here. kind of sad

Improbable's statement says clause 2.4 [0]. Here's [1] what it says now: > 2.4 Streaming and Cloud Gaming Restrictions. > You may not directly or indirectly distribute the Unity Software, including the runtime portion of the Unity Software (the “Unity Runtime”), or your Project Content (if it incorporates the Unity Runtime) by means of streaming or broadcasting so that any portion of the Unity Software is primarily executed on or simulated by the cloud or a remote server and transmitted over the Internet or other network to end user devices without a separate license or authorization from Unity. Without limiting the foregoing, you may not use a managed service running on cloud infrastructure (a “Managed Service”) or a specific integration of a binary add-on (for example, a plugin or SDK) or source code to be integrated in the Unity Software or Your Project Content incorporating the Unity Runtime (an “SDK Integration”) to install or execute the Unity Runtime on the cloud or a remote server, unless such use of the Managed Service or SDK Integration has been specifically authorized by Unity. Additionally, you may not integrate the Unity Runtime with a Managed Service or SDK Integration and offer that integration to third parties for the purpose of installing or using the Unity Runtime on the cloud or a remote server. For a list of Unity authorized streaming platforms, Managed Services and SDK Integrations, click here.This restriction does not prevent end users from…

Unity's statement today certainly adds some context: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/01/10/our-response-to-improbables-blog-… > More than a year ago, we told Improbable in person that they were in violation of our Terms of Service or EULA. Six months ago, we informed Improbable about the violation in writing. Recent actions did not come as a surprise to Improbable; in fact, they’ve known about this for many months. > Two weeks ago we took the action of turning off Improbable’s Unity Editor license keys. This is a unique case — and not a situation we take lightly — but Improbable left us no choice. This was the only course of action to protect the integrity and value of our technology and Unity developers. Yikes. Not exactly what Improbable was claiming... And then Improbable's statement today: https://improbable.io/company/news/2019/01/10/an-update-on-todays-even… > But honestly, we don’t believe that today was about Unity or for that matter Improbable. Yes, let's change the subject. Quickly, now!!

Spatial OS is wholly different from game streaming. Here is the overview provided by one of Unity's streaming partners Genvid [0] "Genvid provides an easy to use SDK, with a C interface, which can be used to automatically capture your game content (audio and video), encode it properly (e.g. H264), and to stream it to a service (e.g. YouTube). It also provides routines to send additional game data to spectators (e.g. scores, player profiles, chances of success, etc.), as well as hooks to receive commands coming from them." In contrast, Spatial OS provides a back-end to a game delivered using Unity: "SpatialOS is a cloud-based computational platform that lets you use many servers and engines to power a single world. The platform coordinates a swarm of micro-services called workers, which overlap and dynamically reorganize to power a huge, seamless world. The platform also lets you handle a huge number of concurrent players across different devices in one world" [0] https://www.genvidtech.com/doc/SDK-1.19.0/quicktour/overview.html#what… [1] https://improbable.io/games/tech

More coverage from other news sites: - Wired: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/improbable-quest-to-build-the-matrix - Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-11/softbank-leads-502-… - TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/11/improbable-grabs-502m-led-by-softban… - Financial Times: https://www.ft.com/content/76529d16-3669-11e7-bce4-9023f8c0fd2e - Improbable's own announcement: https://improbable.io/2017/05/11/our-ceo-herman-narula-on-our-series-b… (Disclosure: I work at Improbable.)

Improbable's story doesn't add up. Improbable acted as if Unity changed their terms overnight, but that's not accurate. This is Improbable's original statement: https://improbable.io/company/news/2019/01/10/unity-blocks-spatialos > Due to a change in Unity’s terms of service (clause 2.4) The text they're talking about is dated December 5th. This capture was taken while that Improbable blog post was fresh, on January 10th: http://web.archive.org/web/20190110175721/https://unity3d.com/legal/te… So section 2.4 is at least a month old at this point. They said nothing to their customers for over a month? Then they created a storm in a teacup, and a bunch of developers freaked out and took their own games down on their own account without ever receiving any sort of notice with Unity. Improbable intentionally manufactured a panic: none of these game developers were contacted by Unity or asked to take their games down. Section 2.4 is nearly identical in the February 2018 ToS by Unity as well: http://web.archive.org/web/20180616042117/https://unity3d.com/legal/te… So Unity's response (here: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/01/10/our-response-to-improbables-blog-… that they talked to Improbable and told them they were in breach of the ToS over a year ago is supported by the actual history of the ToS. Consider a few things: Improbable is not actually an innocent little lamb here:…