Since its successful Kickstarter – and really even before that – Stars Reach studio Playable Worlds has been deluging MMORPG players with lengthy developer interview streams. And if you haven’t been able to keep up with them all, good news: The team has now started posting recaps on Kickstarter itself.
Most recently, Playable Worlds’ director of engineering, David Pitkin, chatted about the game’s infrastructure and systems – kind of a big deal in an MMORPG that will rise and fall on its engineering.
Notably, he explains that while the game is based on the Unity engine, the backend systems are custom or use third-party tools to help them “manage gameplay and support a scalable, persistent simulation.” He also discusses the game’s hosting:
“Worlds in Stars Reach are hosted on virtual machines using Amazon Web Services. These are not tied to physical server blades. Instead, each world is represented by a combination of compute, storage, and network resources that can move and expire over time. David explained that these cloud-based systems are expected to be dynamic, and part of the long-term design is for player activity to influence the lifecycle of planets.”
Pitkin also reiterated that a modding API is still en route, though API access won’t be opened until after the early access launch.
For gamers in the ongoing pre-alpha, heads-up: There are two tests tomorrow and a third around lunchtime on Saturday.
