Analyzing the three design paradigms of the full-chain gaming engines Mud, Dojo, and Zypher

Are self-contained worlds / full-chain games just boring toys for Crypto tech geeks? Or are they a kind of Cult-like MeMe?

The reason for these doubts lies in the abstract complexity of self-contained worlds / full-chain games’ definitions and their currently simplistic and crude game interfaces and interactions, which make most gamers disgusted and intimidated.

However, the fact is that self-contained worlds / full-chain games, despite offering a gaming experience completely different from other paradigm games, do not mean they are not fun. As a veteran gamer, the first full-chain game, DarkForest, was the only game I played continuously for two days straight within five years.

If we say that the space of other games is a sandbox, and the game content simulates escape room games, then the space of full-chain games is a digital physical reality, and the content of full-chain games simulates real-world gaming. While playing DarkForest, I truly experienced the bone-chilling cosmic horror depicted in Liu Cixin’s “The Three-Body Problem”.

Foundational Narrative of Self-Contained Worlds / Full-Chain Games

The Lattice team has set forth the connotations and extensions of the concept of self-contained worlds / full-chain games in the “Declaration of Self-Contained Worlds,” distinguishing them from Web2.5 games.

Self-contained worlds / full-chain games are based on the principles of digital physical reality and basic rules, forming self-sustaining open gaming systems. They possess persistence, immutability, and permissionlessness.

Narrowly defined, full-chain games refer to self-contained worlds, where playability does not stem from the game developer-provided game content (universe view, plot, music, illustrations, etc.) and game objectives (levels, achievements, instances, national warfare), but from the real experiences players construct within self-contained worlds’ sub-worlds.

The construction logic of self-contained worlds / full-chain games is Object - Basic Rules - Digital Physical Reality, corresponding to the Entity - Component - System framework of ECS game engines.

In a sense, self-contained worlds / full-chain games explore building a layer of virtual worlds based on the information bits of the real world we inhabit. Or, as Musk puts it, nesting a new virtual world within a virtual world. This is consistent with a memorable scene from the sci-fi TV series “Rick and Morty,” where multiple layers of worlds are infinitely nested recursively.

Implementation Paradigm of New Primitives in Self-Contained Worlds / Full-Chain Games.

Above is the simplified narrative of self-contained worlds / full-chain games. To instantiate the narrative of self-contained worlds / full-chain games, we need a complete set of new primitives composed of blockchain, game engines, middleware, game clients, and other engineering modules.

The new primitives of self-contained worlds / full-chain games need to address three core issues:

The scalability problem of blockchain. Achieving the persistence, immutability, and permissionlessness of self-contained worlds / full-chain games requires all game states and logic to be on-chain, posing very high demands on the scalability and programmability of blockchain.

The tick loop problem. Blockchain operates as a sequential state machine along the arrow of time and is not suitable for managing the state of self-contained worlds / full-chain games. This is because self-contained worlds / full-chain games involve numerous cyclical events, such as sunrise and sunset, patrols of minor monsters, etc. Additionally, blockchain updates passively, requiring users to send transactions to trigger events.

How to achieve the immutability of digital physical reality and the openness, permissionlessness, and CRUD (create, read, update, delete) operations of basic rules and objects.

To address these three core issues, the self-contained worlds / full-chain game teams, including Lattice, Dojo, and Zypher Games, offer different solutions.

Lattice’s primitives for self-contained worlds / full-chain games consist of the Worlds development framework, the MUD game engine, and the Redstone underlying consensus protocol.

World Development Framework: The World is an intelligent contract development framework built on top of the MUD V2’s new storage engine, STORE. STORE is a storage engine defined by the runtime. MUD V2 uses it to replace the storage model of the Solidity compiler.

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-chain - whether it’s 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 hierarchy of trust and allows untrusted smart contracts to read states and participate in rules without directly writing to 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 the STORE defined by the runtime, state synchronization, and native AA (account abstraction) modules.

The new features of MUD V2 allow for the creation of a set of digital physics, determining how the world is created and transformed, and subsequently breaking the root access to itself; always adhering to a set of standardized rules: anyone - humans and machines - in the world can interact with these rules and build social and engineering devices on top of them.

Redstone Underlying Consensus Protocol: Redstone is the first Plasma Rollup L2 instance of OP Stack, built by Lattice and Optimism in collaboration specifically for developers of on-chain games and autonomous worlds.

Its operation is similar to traditional OP Rollup, but unlike OP Rollup which publishes input states to L1, Redstone only publishes a data commitment hash. The input states corresponding to input commitments are stored off-chain by data availability providers. To ensure that the input states corresponding to input commitments are available, there is a data availability challenge contract on L1, allowing anyone to challenge data commitments if the provider encounters issues.

Dojo was initially a Fork project of MUD, dedicated to implementing MUD on Starknet using the Cario language. The primitives of Dojo’s self-contained worlds / full-chain games now consist of the Cario state and smart contract development framework, the full-chain game engine SOZO CLI, the index and RPC service middleware TORII, and the KATANA underlying consensus protocol.

Cario State and Smart Contract Development Framework: Dojo provides a standardized method for building full-chain games / self-contained worlds on top of Cario smart contracts, simplifying the development process and allowing developers to focus on logic rather than architecture.

SOZO CLI Full-Chain Game Engine: SOZO CLI supports the creation, construction, testing, and deployment of instances of full-chain games / self-contained worlds. It supports the creation of new components and systems, assisting in the management of multiple self-contained world instances.

Index and RPC Service Middleware TORII: TORII automatically indexes all contract states and exposes them automatically 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 the Cario language as the development language.

Unlike Dojo, which forked from MUD to specialize in adaptive full-chain game / self-contained world engine development paths, Zypher Game is a completely native full-chain game / self-contained world engine based on ZK technology. Zypher Game’s primitives for full-chain games / self-contained worlds mainly consist of the Secret Engine game engine, the AW Engine, and the underlying consensus protocol Zytron Kit.

Secret Engine provides a set of SDKs driven by zk (zero-knowledge) to securely execute verifiable encrypted computations, ensuring that the elements required by the game remain sealed on-chain. Existing services like zk-shuffle-as-a-service have already assisted over 3 full-chain card games in encryption and shuffling.

AW Engine: The AW Engine consists of various ZK-driven services SDKs, including the Gadgets toolbox, APP-specific circuits, on-chain validation nodes, and more. The AW Engine can achieve plug-and-play ZK functionality, composability of ZK circuits, and integration with third-party and RISC ZeroZK virtual machines.

AW Engine also innovatively developed the Z4 Engine specifically for multiplayer real-time games. Z4 extends the concurrency of multiplayer multi-round games through zk-rollup, with the core being a fast way to change states. Z4 allows games to avoid global state broadcasts on the source chain and instead transforms them into inexpensive local state changes. This can effectively reduce user transaction fees and support millions or even billions of transactions per second (tps).

Zytron Kit: Zytron Kit is a modular Sovereign L3 Rollup building stack. It consists of the Sovereign L3 Rollup, Zypher Games’ game engine as a precompiled contract, server sharding, data compatibility, and customized networks.

Zytron Kit is tailor-made for developers to build self-contained worlds, mini-strategy games, or migrate AAA games to the chain at the lowest cost, without a steep learning curve. This allows them to migrate assets, game logic, and data storage to the chain while retaining production-level user experience.

In addition to AW Engine and Zytron Kit, Zypher Game also has a proof-of-computation market for mobile game players and integrates with some game-related infrastructure.

Recently, Zypher Game has also partnered with Risc Zero and Celestia. In collaboration with Risc Zero, Zypher Game integrates Risc Zero’s general-purpose ZK virtual machine into the Zypher game engine and extends Risc Zero’s use cases through included game-specific SDKs. In collaboration with Celestia, Zypher Game uses Celestia’s Roll Kit tool to build Zytron Kit and includes Celestia as the default DA layer for Zytron Kit.

Most recently, Zypher Games launched the B² Network testnet, indicating support for the BTC ecosystem and intending to assist the development of on-chain games in the BTC ecosystem through ZKP and AI technologies.

Conclusion

From narrative to primitives, different solutions are provided by autonomous worlds / full-chain games to address the scalability issues of blockchain, the tick loop problem, and the realization of the immutability and basic rules of digital physics, as well as the openness of objects. Lattice chose the path of OP-Rollup+ radical revision of the EVM consensus machine state mechanism, while Zypher Game and Dojo chose to utilize ZKP to trustlessly compress state data and transfer verification to off-chain computation.

Each of the three solutions has its own strengths. Lattice’s implementation paradigm has advantages in EVM compatibility and developer friendliness. Dojo Game is tailored to the development environment and ecological specificity of Starknet. Zypher chooses to utilize modular DA, RiscZero ZK coprocessor, and the native digital physical characteristics of Bitcoin UTXO to achieve a solution with trustlessness, scalability, and performance elasticity.

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

Currently, full-chain games / autonomous worlds are in the technological budding stage of Gartner’s emerging technology growth curve. At this stage, the number of developers is greater than that of players, and many test games are casual games similar to 4399. However, this does not deter crypto venture capital funds from repeatedly investing heavily in this emerging field. Because in their eyes, the current state of full-chain games / autonomous worlds is not a problem but an opportunity, much like trains in the 1820s unable to outrun horse carriages.

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