Three design paradigms of full-chain game engines Mud, Dojo, and Zypher

Author: NingNing, Source: Author's Twitter @0xNing0x

Are autonomous world/full-chain games just boring toys for Crypto tech geeks? Or is it a cult type MeMe?

The reason for these questions is that the abstract and complex definition of autonomous world/full-chain games and the current simple to rudimentary game interface and interaction make most game players disgusted and daunted.

But in fact, although autonomous world/full-chain games have a completely different gaming experience from other paradigm games, it does not mean that they are not fun. As an old game player, the first full-chain game DarkForest is the only game I played overnight for two consecutive days in 5 years.

If the space of other games is a sandbox, and the game content is a simulation of the chamber game, then the space of the full-chain game is digital physical reality, and the content of the full-chain game is a simulation of the real-world game. In the process of playing DarkForest, I really experienced the cosmic horror that penetrated into the bone marrow in Liu Cixin's "The Three-Body Problem".

The basic narrative of autonomous world/full-chain games

The Lattice team set the connotation and extension of the concept of autonomous world/full-chain games in the "Autonomous World Declaration", separating autonomous world/full-chain games from Web2.5 games.

Autonomous world/full-chain games are self-sustaining open game systems based on digital physical reality and basic laws. They are persistent, immutable, and permissionless.

In a narrow sense, full-chain games are autonomous worlds. Their playability does not come from the game content (cosmology, plot, music, character illustrations, etc.) and game goals (levels, achievements, dungeons, national wars) provided by game developers, but from the real experience of the sub-worlds (Sub-Worlds) built by players in the autonomous world.

The construction logic of autonomous worlds/full-chain games is objects-basic rules-digital physical reality, which correspond to entities-components-systems of the game engine ECS framework.

In a sense, autonomous worlds/full-chain games are exploring the construction of the next layer of virtual worlds based on the information bits of the real world we live in. Or we can use Musk's words to nest a new virtual world based on a virtual world. This is consistent with the famous scene of infinite recursive nesting of a multi-layer world in the science fiction American TV series "Rick and Morty".

The implementation paradigm of the new primitives of autonomous worlds/full-chain games

The above is a simplified narrative of autonomous worlds/full-chain games. To instantiate the narrative of autonomous world/full-chain games, we need a whole set of new primitives consisting of engineering modules such as blockchain, game engine, middleware, and game client.

The new primitives of autonomous world/full-chain games need to solve three core problems:

1. The scalability of blockchain. To achieve the persistence, immutability, and permissionlessness of autonomous world/full-chain games, all game states and logics need to be on the chain, which places very high demands on the scalability and programmability of blockchain.

2. The tick cycle problem. Blockchain is a sequential state machine along the arrow of time, which is not suitable for managing the state of autonomous world/full-chain games. Because autonomous world/full-chain games have a large number of cyclic events, such as sunrise and sunset, the patrol route of monsters, etc. Moreover, blockchain is a passive state update, and users need to send transactions to trigger events.

3. How to achieve the immutability of digital physical reality and the openness and permissionlessness of basic laws and object addition, query, modification, and deletion.

For the above three core issues, the autonomous world/full-chain game primitives of the autonomous world/full-chain game teams Lattice, Dojo and Zypher Games give different solutions.

Lattice's autonomous world/full-chain game primitives consist of the Worlds development framework, MUD game engine and Redstone underlying consensus protocol.

World development framework. World is a smart contract development framework built on the new storage engine STORE of MUD V2. STORE is a storage engine defined by Runtime. MUD V2 replaces the storage model of the Solidity compiler with it.

World is a new paradigm for EVM applications. You can think of it as a community computer: it exists as a multiplayer game kernel, accepting contributions from anyone on the chain - whether it is code or state.

World has programmable access management capabilities, allowing any state or logic to control which account (or other logic) can access them. This makes it possible to establish a trust hierarchy and allows untrusted smart contracts to read the state and participate in the rules without having to write them directly to the storage.

MUD Game Engine. The MUD full-chain game engine is the first full-chain game engine in the EVM ecosystem. MUD V2 consists of a runtime-defined storage engine STORE, state synchronization, and native AA (account abstraction) modules.

MUD V2's new features allow the creation of a set of digital physics that determine how the world is created and transformed, and subsequently destroys root access to itself; without limiting the feature set, always adhere to a set of normative rules: anyone in the world - humans and machines - can interact with these rules and build social and engineering devices on top of these rules.

Redstone underlying consensus protocol. Redstone is the first Plasma Rollup L2 instance of OP Stack, built by Lattice and Optimism for developers of on-chain games and autonomous worlds.

It operates similarly to traditional OP Rollup, but unlike OP Rollup, which publishes input states to L1, Redstone only publishes a data commitment hash. The input state corresponding to the input commitment is stored off-chain by the data availability provider. To ensure that the input state corresponding to the input commitment is available, there is a data availability challenge contract on L1 that allows anyone to challenge the data commitment in the event of a problem with the provider.

Dojo was a fork project of MUD in the early days, dedicated to implementing MUD in the Cario language on Starknet. Today's Dojo's autonomous world/full-chain game primitives consist of the Cario state and smart contract development framework, the full-chain game engine SOZO CLI, the index and RPC service middleware TORLL, and the KATANA underlying consensus protocol.

Cario state and smart contract development framework. Dojo provides a standardized way to build full-chain games/autonomous worlds on Cario smart contracts, simplifying the development process and allowing developers to focus on logic rather than architecture.

Full-chain game engine SOZO CLI. SOZO CLI supports the creation, construction, testing and deployment of full-chain game/autonomous world instances, supports the creation of new components and systems, and assists in the management of multiple autonomous world instances.

Index and RPC service middleware TORII. TORII automatically indexes all contract states. Automatically exposes states through GraphQL API or gRPC. Developers no longer need to generate custom indexers.

KATANA underlying consensus protocol. KATANA is a customizable Starknet development network that allows for rapid iteration of game logic.

The main difference between Dojo and MUD is the use of ZK-Rollup as the underlying consensus protocol and Cario language as the development language.

Different from the development path of Dojo forked MUD-adaptive specialized full-chain game/autonomous world engine, Zypher Game is a completely native full-chain game/autonomous world engine based on ZK technology. Zypher Game's full-chain game/autonomous world primitives are mainly composed of game engines Secret Engine, AW Engine and underlying consensus protocol Zytron Kit.

Secret Engine provides a set of SDKs driven by zk that can safely perform verifiable cryptographic calculations, ensuring that the elements required by the game remain sealed on the chain. The existing service zk-shuffle-as-a-service has helped more than 3 full-chain card games to encrypt and shuffle.

AW Engine. AW Engine is composed of various ZK-driven services SDKs, including Gadgets toolbox, APP-specific circuits, on-chain verification nodes, etc. AW Engine can realize plug-and-play ZK functions, composability of ZK circuits, and integration of third parties with RISC ZeroZK virtual machines.

AW Engine has also innovatively developed the Z4 engine specifically for multiplayer real-time games. Z4 uses zk-rollup to expand the concurrency of multiplayer multi-games. The core is a fast way of state change. Z4 allows games to convert from global state broadcasts on the source chain to cheap local state changes, which can effectively reduce user fees and support millions or even billions of tps.

Zytron Kit. Zytron Kit is a modular Sovereign L3 Rollup building stack. Zytron Kit consists of sovereign L3 Rollup, Zypher Games' game engine as a precompiled contract, server sharding, data compatibility, and customized network.

Zytron Kit is tailored for developers to build autonomous worlds, mini-strategy games, or migrate AAA games to the chain at minimal cost without a steep learning curve, enabling them to migrate assets, game logic, and data storage on the chain while retaining production-level UE.

In addition to AW Engine and Zytron Kit, Zypher Game also has a proof computing market for mobile gamers, and Zypher is also integrating with some game-related infrastructure. .

Recently, Zypher Game has also reached cooperation with Risc Zero and Celesita. In cooperation with Risc Zero, Zypher Game integrated Risc Zero's general ZK virtual machine into the Zypher game engine and expanded the use cases of Risc Zero through the included game-specific SDK extensions. In cooperation with Celesita, Zypher Game uses Celesita's Roll Kit tool to build Zytron Kit, and uses Celesita as the default DA layer of Zytron Kit.

Recently, Zypher Games launched the B² Network testnet, indicating that it is supporting the BTC ecosystem and will help the BTC ecosystem develop on-chain games through ZKP and AI technology.

Summary

From narrative to primitives, in order to deal with the scalability problems of blockchain, the Tick cycle problem, the immutability and basic laws of digital physical reality, and the openness of objects, the new primitives of autonomous world/full-chain games provide different solutions. Lattice chose the path of OP-Rollup+ violently modified EVM consensus machine state mechanism, while Zypher Game and Dojo chose to use ZKP to trustlessly compress state data and transfer verification to off-chain calculations.

The three solutions have their own advantages. Lattice's implementation paradigm has advantages in EVM compatibility and developer friendliness. Dojo Game is specifically adapted to Starknet's development environment and ecosystem. Zypher chooses to use modular DA, RiscZero Zk coprocessor, and Bitcoin UTXO's native digital physical characteristics to implement a solution that combines trustlessness, scalability, and performance elasticity.

In addition to the above three paradigms, there are also Argus's World Engine and Nervous (CKB)'s full-chain game/autonomous world primitives based on the eUTXO state data structure.

At present, the full-chain game/autonomous world is in the technological embryonic stage of the Gartner emerging technology growth curve. At this stage, the number of developers is greater than the number of players, and many test games are 4399-like casual games. This does not prevent crypto venture capital funds from repeatedly betting heavily in this emerging field. Because in their eyes, the current state of the full-chain game/autonomous world is like the train that could not outrun the carriage in the 1820s. It is not a problem, but an opportunity.