In an ambitious move, PlayerUnknown , the creator of PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS , now has his sites firmly set on building Artemis , the world’s first expansive open source metaverse where everyone will be able to participate. Given PlayerUnknown’s track record, he could very well pull this off, but is it too lofty a goal even for him and his crew? Let’s dig in a little and find out more about Project Artemis and how PlayerUnknown plans to tackle this monumental challenge.
Can You Build the Metaverse?
Building a game or MMORPG is a serious undertaking in its own right, but creating an entire world filled with different locations and thousands, if not millions of people is just on a whole other level. Despite this fact, many are taking it upon themselves to develop the Metaverse and build the immersive virtual world of the future. With the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Meta working tirelessly and dedicating huge sums of money to accomplishing this goal, the competition is nothing short of intense.
In spite of the odds, PlayerUnknown is working to build an open source metaverse in the form of Artemis. For those of you who don’t know, Artemis is the Greek Goddess of the hunt, wild animals, vegetation, childbirth and chastity. In many way, Artemis herself embodies creation and life itself, so this is a fitting title for PlayerUnknown’s latest project.
But where did all of this begin? Well, to gain an appreciation of how ambitious Artemis is, you need to look back to 2019/2020 with the creation of Prologue , a tech demo that revealed the mass terrain generation tools that PlayerUnknown and his crew are developing especially for Artemis.
So How Does Prologue Work?
Since Prologue is a demo, the goal is simple and geared to guide you through the generated virtual world. Basically you’ll need to make it from point A to point B while facing a winter storm, so you’ll need to use your cunning and some found tools in order to make it through. But here’s the thing: every time you click play, the world is completely new, generated from scratch just for that particular session.
So while it may not be all that sophisticated at present, the potential applications here are unbelievable. Fully randomized generated environments means that players should be able to experience new sights and challenges on a perpetual basis. For a truly expansive metaverse that may be the size of a planet (or even several planets), this is an absolute must, so while the tech undoubtedly needs to go through several more iterations before it becomes truly powerful, the concept is there. Now it’s just a matter of time, effort and unparalleled commitment.
The Tech Underpinning Artemis
Right, so you can’t build a massive planet-sized world without some serious tech serving as the foundation. For this reason, PlayerUnknown is working on Project Melba , which is a brand new engine that will drive Artemis. Now I could go into a huge amount of detail about Melba, but that’ll require an article all its own. For this reason I’ll try sum this up as best I can for now. In fact, you can just read what the team at PlayerUnknown has to say about Project Melba:
Project Melba is built for scalability at its core, using technologies like data-driven design, multi-core processing and machine learning to power a planetary scale simulation. As our applied research division, Project Melba is a process, not a product. It allows us to ask complex questions from new angles in an effort (to) build bigger, deeper worlds.
Existing tech just won’t cut it, and considering just how ambitious Artemis is, building something entirely from the ground up using all the latest tech is an absolute necessity. And just so you know, we’re not talking months here. Not even a year or two. Nope, the timeline to really get Project Melba and Artemis to where they need to be is something like 10 to 15 years. That’s a lot of time and a lot of money, but the end result has the potential to change the world of gaming, and indeed the world itself, forever.
Unleashing Artemis
The end goal is what matters here, and it’s about as epic as it gets. Thousands of kilometers of terrain inhabited by thousands of people all building, exploring and socializing will take nothing short of incredible processing power and a whole lot of conscientious development (and likely ongoing updates, because I can imagine that some of the bugs that might emerge could be pretty nasty). Now another question we can ask here is “Is this Web3?” Well, it ain’t Web2, but if you want to know whether this will be built on a blockchain or not, the answer is no. However, that doesn’t mean that blockchain tech won’t play a role in the future. Yes, it’s entirely possible that NFTs will make their way into Artemis at some stage, but right now that’s just conjecture, so don’t quote me on that.
In many ways this seems like one of the most compelling projects around, and with tech actively being developed, I’m really hoping his project actually becomes something substantial. Sure it’s going to take a long time to get to where it needs to be, but work is already underway, and with the people working on it, I’m totally bullish on PlayerUnknown’s Artemis…
So what do you think of Artemis? Is this the Metaverse we’ve been waiting for? Or does it not stand a chance? Let us know your thoughts!
Comments 0