An Epic future for SPJ

https://discourse.haskell.org/t/an-epic-future-for-spj/3573

by Smaug123 • 5 years ago

365 169 5 years ago

discourse.haskell.org

dochtman• 5 years ago

Anyone know more information about Verse itself?

tweedledee• 5 years ago

A huge loss to and a massive vote of no confidence in MSR Cambridge.

Is Epic worse than Facebook? I can’t imagine much of an upside to praying on human frailties in order to make games addictive to extract money from kids.

ksec5• 5 years ago

Is Epic worse than Facebook? I can’t imagine much of an upside to praying on human frailties in order to make games addictive to extract money from kids.

What?

Mikeb853• 5 years ago

Probably a reference to the fact that Epic makes a ton of money from Fortnite.

otabdeveloper4• 5 years ago

Have you seen kids these days? Video games are an addictive substance like cigarettes or alcohol.

(Yes, I know you played Mario Brothers as a child and turned out fine. So did I. But the stuff we had back in the day is extremely tame and weak compared to the hard stuff they peddle today.)

friedman23• 5 years ago

I wonder what the new language is going to look like, one thing I'm interested in is declarative programming languages. I feel like a declarative programming language would actually be a pretty good fit for games.

brightly-salty• 5 years ago

I'd suspect based on SPJ's previous comments that it would be a strict statically-typed pure functional language but it probably depends on what amount of control he has on fun/research vs utility to Epic.

sk0g• 5 years ago

Sorry for the later reply, but Epic bought Skookum, the company behind SkookumScript [0]. They have showed off usages of it in Fortnite [1] too, and it looks pretty interesting, if a bit wacky to current programmers. Assuming he's there to push SkookumScript/ Verse over the line for UE5's release and beyond, this would be a good preview of the final work.

[0] https://skookumscript.com/about/look/ [1] https://twitter.com/nephasto/status/1340046706642186247

willvarfar• 5 years ago

I always remember SPJ’s chart in a short jokey video “Haskell is useless” https://youtu.be/iSmkqocn0oQ

Really made me see things clearer.

eklavya• 5 years ago

It’s funny in my mind that I laughed at his joke about “the computer would just produce heat” and somehow the whole of cryptocurrency is literally doing just that.

Mikeb853• 5 years ago

Good video, never seen it before. Thanks! Also love the fact he doesn't take himself or programming things too seriously (Haskell in useless category is great).

ksec5• 5 years ago

I really like his chart about usefulness and Unsafe programming. And that was in 2011! We have seen in the past 10 years how programming moving in the direction he was pointing at.

graffitici• 5 years ago

I guess Rust is a language that went the move to Safe and Useful, following the top arrow?

amelius• 5 years ago

It lacks a GC however, which Haskell has for a reason.

WJW2• 5 years ago

Rust prevents a few types of unsafety, mostly relating to memory and concurrency. There are many more on which Rust does not do particularly well though. Specifically, Rust allows arbitrary side effects from basically any part of the code. You can always write to stdout or a logfile, or open up new sockets, or delete files from the filesystem and there will be nothing in the type signature to even warn you about this.

kzrdude• 5 years ago

I think SPJ is using a slightly different definition of safe than Rust does! But Rust should definitely be a bit up his safeness scale, but not all the way, doesn't fully control all effects.

Jare• 5 years ago

A long time coming since Tim Sweeney's 2005 talk referred to functional concepts and things like STM https://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/edu/seminare/2005/advanced...

servytor• 5 years ago

Tim Sweeney did a presentation[0] at MIT's CSAIL on programming languages that I thought was really interesting (it mentions Haskell quite a bit), titled "The Next Mainstream Programming Language: A Game Developer’s Perspective."

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120113030236/http://groups.csa...

kreetx• 5 years ago

Recently listened to the Haskell Interlude podcast with Lennart Augustson where he mentions in the end that he's at Epic Games. Looks like they are investing greatly in Haskell-like things now.

[1] https://haskell.foundation/podcast/2/

zemo• 5 years ago

On slide 57 he takes the following position:

    Memory model
    – Garbage collection should be the only option

an interesting position to see Sweeney take up, since so many people in games reflexively say that garbage collection is totally non-viable whenever it comes up.

but he also says:

    By 2009, game developers will face...
    CPU’s with:
    –20+ cores

MacBook Pros, Razer Blades, the XBox Series X, and the PS5 all use 8-core CPUs, so the prediction of an ever-escalating number of CPU cores seems to have not really panned out. One thing that has been majorly outside of these predictions is the dedicated ML chips like the M1's Neural Engine.

The presentation isn't explicitly dated, but since the sample game is Gears of War, which came out in 2006, later on he says "by 2009" as if it was not-yet 2009, and the file name is "sweeney06games.pdf", gonna say this is almost certainly a presentation given in 2006. At the time this was given, the iPhone hadn't even come out yet.

It's an interesting presentation. I wonder what Sweeney would say today about this presentation, about how much of it still rings true, and about which things he would second-guess nowadays.

eecc• 5 years ago

MacBook Pros, Razer Blades, the XBox Series X, and the PS5 all use 8-core CPUs, so the prediction of an ever-escalating number of CPU cores seems to have not really panned out.

You seem to forget the GPU, how may cores does that have? (but really the question is: isn't parallelism the default mode when working with GPUs.

pjmlp5• 5 years ago

Most of those people aren't aware that Unreal Blueprints and Unreal C++ do have GC.

They just see C++ and don't look into the details.

Besides that, given that most engines now have a scripting layer, even if deep down on the engine GC is forbidden, the layer above it, used by the game designers, will make use of it.

It is like fostering about C and C++ performance, while forgetting that 30 years ago, they weren't welcomed on game consoles, and on the 8/16 bit home micros for games.

My phone is more powerful than any Lisp Machine or Xerox PARC workstation, it can spare some GC cycles.

chc4• 5 years ago

Most people's mental model of garbage collection is still just stop-the-world mark-and-sweep, which is extremely old. Game developers hate GC because of impossible to predict or the lack of ability to limit latency pauses eating into the frame budget - but there are tons of new, modern GC implementations that have no pauses, do collection and scanning incrementally on a seperate thread, have extremely low overhead for write barriers and only have to scan a minimal subset of changed objects to recompute liveness, etc. that are probably a great choice for a new programming language for a game engine. Game data models are famously highly interconnected and have non-trivial ownership, and games already use things like deferred freeing of objects (via area allocators) to avoid doing memory management on the hot path that it could do automatically for everything.

LegitShady• 5 years ago

he was off by some decades but that is mostly intel's fault. about a decade later we have intel chips coming out with 10 cores and amd with 16 cores. We're getting there.

throwawayapples2• 5 years ago

By 2009, game developers will face... CPU’s with: 20+ cores

It seems like he was off by a matter of a few months at most.

I have a quad AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 6172 (Mar 2010) 2U server with 48 hardware cores. This motherboard can also take the 16 core CPU's which were also introduced the following year, which would put it at 64 cores and 128 threads.

The Opteron 6 core CPU's were introduced in June 2009, so a quad server would be 24 cores, or 48 threads.

Of course, that's not cores in a single CPU, if that's what even what the prediction was referring to, but that probably wouldn't matter very much from a gaming dev perspective anyway. It was probably a pretty good guess, all things considered.

nabla9• 5 years ago

Even with garbage collection, you still can manage memory manually on top of gc by creating a pool and managing it manually.

bazooka_penguin• 5 years ago

Pretty sure unreal engine 4 and 5 have garbage collection built into the runtime

ksec5• 5 years ago

You have to look at it from 2005 context. PS3 was just announced, Cell Processor with 8 CPU Core. But the original target for Cell was 32 Core. It was always thought some day, may be PS4 would get to that. Intel would have to compete with more Cores because they just went through the whole Pentium 4 scaling problem. The future is going to be super multiCore. And software will catch up ( somehow ) once the hardware is here. And that is not exactly a bad take in 2005/2006 considering Intel announced their work on Larabee in 2008 and was pushing for some collaboration with Sony on using it for PS4.

And of course none of these happened. GPU and CPU did not converged, they both scale far ahead than anyone could imagined.

I mean, if you ask developers in 2006, no one would thought of doing 4K rendering with HDR / 120fps and still not doing Ray Tracing.

seanmcdirmid• 5 years ago

He wrote an article on I think gamespy of the same variety. Back in 2000 nonetheless, it really influenced the direction I took in grad school: https://m.slashdot.org/story/9565 (the actual article seems to be lost, maybe I can dredge up a web archive link).

Fudgel• 5 years ago

Thanks, that was a great read.

armchairhacker• 5 years ago

Might be similar to and looks like it's going to replace https://skookumscript.com

losvedir• 5 years ago

Wow! Didn't see that coming, but very interesting. When he says "the metaverse", does he mean Epic is working on one of their own? Or is it the one facebook is working on, and they have some sort of partnership?

gpm• 5 years ago

Epic has been talking about the metaverse for years... e.g. it came up a lot in their Apple lawsuit, and searching on google turns this up from mid 2019: https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/115784180038569574...

So far it seems like they sort of vaguely want to turn Fortnite into it... but I haven't really seen much that I would call concrete.

Barrin92• 5 years ago

So far it seems like they sort of vaguely want to turn Fortnite into it... but I haven't really seen much that I would call concrete.

I always thought their Travis Scott event was a pretty good example of something you could call early metaverse-ish, going beyond the usual scope of the game

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYeFAlVC8qU

cma4• 5 years ago

Since at least 2016:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xG9-6k3RYIU

Slide 46 and on (mentioned on 48) is largely metaverse and a bunch of stuff presaging the Apple lawsuit, even though Fortnite hadn't launched yet:

https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/apps/steamdevdays/slides2...

YetAnotherNick• 5 years ago

I think Epic is working on VR games, and saying metaverse is more cooler.

theptip3• 5 years ago

When you say “the one FB is working on” - the stated goal is for there to be one Metaverse, as there is one Internet.

Of course that requires protocol interop (as did the Internet with TCP/IP and HTTP) and who knows if it will happen for the Metaverse.

kibwen2• 5 years ago

Metaverses are less fundamental than the internet, and there's no need for there to be exactly one of them (other than lucrative proprietary lock-in, anyway). Metaverses are application-level concerns, and will be built on top of the existing internet infrastructure. In the same way that a web browser is a portal to HTTP content, a metaverse application will be a portal to whatever application-level protocols arise to support them.

dagmx4• 5 years ago

Have either Tim Sweeney or Mark Zuckerberg said that there's plans for only a single metaverse?

I think it's been pretty clear that they're going to work on their own metaverse products. Epic seems to build on Fortnite , while Meta have Horizon.

I don't believe either have stated compatibility as a goal.

glennpratt• 5 years ago

Seems pretty clear companies are talking about "the metaverse" as broad concept.

https://tech.fb.com/connect-2021-our-vision-for-the-metavers...

https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/announcing-a-1-bil...

https://www.matthewball.vc/about

bangonkeyboard• 5 years ago

An early look at Verse syntax: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/840713360?t=01h06m24s

atarian• 5 years ago

Timestamp?

polio• 5 years ago

It's in the query param: 01h06m24s

dharmaturtle• 5 years ago

    CurrentRound^ : int = 0

    for (i = 1..NumberOfRounds):
        CurrentRound := i
        if(!SetupPlayersAndSpawnPoints()?):
            ShutdownGame()
            return
        else:
            Players.PutAllInStasisAllowEmotes()
            ResetMatch()

Looks nonfunctional as heck to me. Also it isn't expression-based - at least that's what the bare `return` says to me.

Honestly just looks like a dialect of Python. I wonder what SPJ will do with it...

shaunxcode• 5 years ago

If it were up to me: make sure it has the primitives required to write things in a "mostly functional" way if the programmer desires/when the problem fits the space. Not sure the whole list but maybe starting with nice syntax for lambdas and built in immutable collections? Maybe a macro system for introducing syntax? OK you caught me just make it a lisp with python syntax and types.

keyle• 5 years ago

Ugh. Failing to see why lua isn't a better choice than this. Even a subset of lua augmented with those funky ^? stuff to achieve what you want to achieve in terms of safety.

Feels like "the whole everything is looking old we got new keywords! Metaverse! We need new languages...".

The older I get the more I feel like languages are just as generational as developers come into the market. They don't want to write Java, even python is getting old. We need new fresh languages every 5-10 years which frankly just feels like the same walls with a fresh coat of paint.

runevault2• 5 years ago

What is SPJ supposed to bring to this? Are they gonna throw a top end type system onto it or something? Nothing about this looks interesting at first blush.

__s• 5 years ago

Previously he only announced leaving MSR two months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28473733

exdsq• 5 years ago

I also expect to work with Dan Piponi on data-centre-scale transactional memory

This sounds really interesting, I learned about STM in Haskell while working on Cardano & it seemed so obvious - I am sure there will be some seminal outcomes of this too.

DethNinja• 5 years ago

It is pure speculation but I don’t believe Epic’s Verse language will be a functional programming language.

Verse is more intended for Blueprint people and there is no way people working on the Blueprint code will be able to move into functional programming.

Also I don’t get the investment into Verse language itself, why not just fund LuaJit, do we really need another scripting language when LUA nailed some many things right?

I guess Epic will craft a pretty fast scripting language and try to lock game developers to their own ecosystem.

dllthomas6• 5 years ago

I don't know, Simon has been big on "spreadsheets as functional programming" for a bit. Something blueprinty built with that point of view might be both "functional" and approachable.

ksec5• 5 years ago

Simon has been big on "spreadsheets as functional programming"

Thanks for the keyword quote. Interesting topic as I felt Spreadsheet is very under-represented form of programming. Especially when trillions of dollars relies on Excel to function properly.

pjmlp5• 5 years ago

Visual languages can be quite functional, specially when they map into IC like modules.

WoahNoun• 5 years ago

It my not be FP, but I imagine it will be heavily type dependent and Haskell has one of the best type systems of any programming language.

tinco2• 5 years ago

Blueprint is already basically Haskell, I've done both and the similarities are striking. I think the world is ready for a proper visual programming language that plays nice with git, compiles down to native code and has all the nice abstractions that Haskell offers and none of the downsides of a scripting language. No doubt SPJ is one of the people who can help make that dream a reality, not in small part because just his presence will attract the best and brightest to Epic.

cma4• 5 years ago

Blueprint is already basically Haskell

It doesn't have lambdas/closures. You have to create a whole separate object in a separate file to pass something new with data that can be called later.

rowanG077• 5 years ago

Honestly Lua is a horrible, terrible language. It's only gotten so widespread because it's trivial to embed.

bmitc• 5 years ago

Sounds like Epic is hiring some pretty epic people. From the article, Dan Piponi works there as Principal Mathematician. As far as titles go, that's a dream one. I've really enjoyed some of Dan Piponi's writing and blog posts.

agumonkey3• 5 years ago

I wonder how fast the cutural view of haskell will shift now. Lots of young minds will be exposed to haskell/purefp with a very exciting and positive light, meaning they'll probably sip all of it without questionning it. Pretty good but maybe a little bad too.

thewakalix2• 5 years ago

What are you talking about?

agumonkey3• 5 years ago

Haskell is still niche, but if the gaming community gets wind of that thing Epic is using for their systems, they might get interested in a vastly different way people are looking at haskell and pure fp right now. This might bring a new (and vast) crowd, and a crowd that might come with an apriori appreciation of haskell (because of the Epic brand trust), this often causes a religious view on whatever idea is learned.

shrimpx2• 5 years ago

Bizarre move. AFAIK he does whatever he wants at MSR. Maybe he's sick of that environment's politics; maybe he's sick of academic research/the ICFP crowd and wants to work on "real world" stuff. I can't imagine it's about money.

nickkell• 5 years ago

I would’ve also assumed his job was perfect, but he’s the best judge of that!

This is basically what Erik Meijer did isn’t it? He worked at Microsoft and produced some really nice things that had a big impact, like reactive extensions for example.

shrimpx2• 5 years ago

Yeah. Simon Marlow also left MSR years ago, for Facebook.

twic2• 5 years ago

MSR is having pretty substantial layoffs at the moment. Some kind of substantial reorientation, with whole projects being shut down.

nextos• 5 years ago

Yes, AFAIK they are setting up a major lab in Amsterdam on molecule design using deep generative models.

mightybyte• 5 years ago

Never underestimate the capacity of poor management for screwing things up.

zepto• 5 years ago

Much as I am suspicious of Epic, this kind of move is way better than their silly stunt with the App Store.

The way to beat Apple is to develop better technology than them. It will take billions of dollars to do this, but Epic has the money.

Shorn• 5 years ago

It may be worth noting that Steve Lucco[1] also left MS recently, after a stint of about 20 years.

[1] self-described co-designer of Typescript - https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-lucco-b5084958/

An Epic future for SPJ

Related Stories