[EXCLUSIVE] Shinra Technologies Looks At Changing Multiplayer Gaming Experience With Supercomputer Cloud Gaming

Console hardware is not the only technology seeing a breakthrough by way of next-gen developments. New company Shinra Technologies, based in New York, has its sights on changing multiplayer gaming.

Following the beta run of its supercomputer cloud gaming in Japan on Feb. 17 and announcing dev partners, Shinra Technologies has also announced plans of a beta in the U.S. come this summer. In an exclusive interview with International Business Times Australia, Shinra Technologies Senior Vice President Jacob Navok revealed some details regarding the game-changing features cloud tech will bring.

One of the main thrusts of Shinra Technologies is to shift game to the server. Navok believes this is integral and inevitable, given that gaming is turning its sights to maximising the potential of next-gen territory. The new hardware has now allowed for previous limitations from consoles, and 2015 is looking to be the best year to see the progress in this direction.

“While cloud gaming companies have focused in the past on encoding a player’s gameplay and streaming it to the user as a video, we focus on a new area, which we call ‘remote rendering’,” Navok told IBTimes AU exclusively. “It allows for scale; meaning that instead of, say, 32 players playing on 32 gaming PCs, performing 32 individual actions and sending all that information to a central server, we instead make one instance of the engine.”

According to Navok, that one instance allows everyone to play on that platform, allowing for efficiency and for the company to stream the final output to each of the players. Navok defines this new way as a means of letting people into a new “living game world.”

Having one instance instead of an engine running for a number of players allows more major advancements in gameplay experiences. Navok cited particle-based terrain deformation as one of these new and never-before-seen executions in games. He drew a picture of how this will look like, using the example of shifting sand dunes under a player’s character in the game.

Doing that action in a multiplayer and having it synced with all of the clients connected to the multiplayer game is technically impossible. However, with the use of what the company calls “supercomputer” cloud gaming, it becomes possible.

“The design of the servers is similar to a supercomputer; we have multiple render and compute farms talking to each other via high speed interconnects like they’re one logical unit,” said Navok.

Even more amazing would be the plan of expanding the capability of massively multiplayer online games, or MMO, in terms of players affecting the worlds. Typically, online games exist in instances, and MMOs allow additions to the shared world between individual instances. But Shinra Technologies’ goal is to allow gamers to affect how the way the in-game world looks and feels beyond just one instance. When something changes in the world, the change stays. And Shinra Technologies’ contribution to this lies in removing the need to download patches for the changes made to the local machine.

Technically speaking, Navok shares the main core of Shinra Technologies is changing the one CPU, one GPU and one game for one user mentality. And it does so by proposing a more cost-effective and feasible way, as opposed to the still-plausible but expensive way of dedicating several GPUs and CPUs to a single user.

“What Shinra’s fundamental technology does is split CPU from GPU, and then balance that across potentially dozens of users on a single GPU, and dozens more on a single CPU. The more players we add, the more we scale,” said Navok.

“And the end result is, it becomes possible to ‘share’ a supercomputer among players in such a way that the costs work out. You’re getting access to something greater than you ever could have afforded on your own.”

Navok cited a number of changes in gaming experiences that will come with Shinra Technologies’ supercomputer cloud gaming. Pushing both physics and artificial intelligence in games come as the main changes. The technology will have the ability to offload physics to a different server that is connected to the company’s render farms. As for artificial intelligence, Navok mentioned that Shinra Technologies can even dedicate an entire server to provide smarter AIs in-game. This can ultimately bring more characters that are life-like and can act organically in the world.

For now, Shinra Technologies’ new cloud technology is aimed at the PCs. But this is only the starting line for the company. Navok stated the PC is a good place to start due to the number of gamers on the platform, whichc makes it easier to implement the system.

Just this month, Shinra Technologies announced Hardsuit Labs joins its Prototype Accelerator program. The program invites developers to create new gaming experiences in the spirit of going beyond traditional gaming development.

“We have a long history of being early tech adopters—with previous efforts focused on new engines, new consoles, and new business models—and now the opportunity to be an early adopter of cloud gaming is extremely exciting,” said Russell Nelson, co-founder of Hardsuit Labs, in a press release sent to IBTimes Australia.

Previously, the company also announced its partnership with Ubisoft. The accelerator prototype program, according to Navok, is a way to seek out development partners and support them. Currently, Shinra Technologies is conversing with both AAA companies and independent developers to give its technology a spin.

Yoichi Wada on Cloud Game Design (Credit: YouTube/Shinra Technologies, Inc.)

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