I have a lot of notes I've taken over the years documenting my ideas for this project… Getting funded would allow me to fully open source the project and my ideas as well as allowing for community engagement and code contributions to anyone who might want to contribute to the project.
Timeline:
A mathematical description of physics system in about two or three months. An initial implementation of the physics system with the ability to test things out in isolated sandbox environments in about half a year. Integration with Cardano to trade in-game materials, and an initial server-side application to allow people to contribute computational and storage resources to the distributed network in about a year. I plan on mostly focusing on the back-end functionality of this project, and maybe working on an API for interfacing with the system so that others can work on front-ends or sub-games that build on top of the fundamental physics of this system.
Storyline: A small company has found a way to open a portal to an alternate universe! Not a lot is yet known about this new place, but plans are underway to provide explorers around the world the ability to interact with what researchers at the Nmadi company are informally calling Nmadi Space. The process of interacting with Nmadi Space is currently accomplished by enclosing small pockets of space and matter in a stasis field and detaching them from their environment in interdimensional space. These enclosures can be observed and possibly interacted with in isolation from the rest of their environment. There has also been some evidence that forms of life might exist in these strange little ecospheres! Nmadi Co. hopes to give you a way of securing your connection to your ecospheres through the use of non-fungible tokens on the Cardano platform. Initially they will be isolated even from each other, but eventually the ability to safely transfer materials from one ecosphere to another in a controlled way should be possible. The final goal is to gain full access to Nmadi Space so that explorers can directly explore and interact with each other in this new world!
Some information about the physics system: When people run the server program, it should test the latency between nodes registered on the network and build a graph structure with weighted edges representing the time it takes to transmit information between different instances of the server. The graph structure should be allowed to spread out into three-dimensional space which maps to the spacial structure of the game universe. Different nodes should overlap in jurisdiction over surrounding space with a drop-off function based on latency and the real-time constraints of the game. A high-mass form of matter in the game should represent the computing power of the machines that are maintaining the system and the gravity of this matter should be tuned to converge where there is the most overlap between server jurisdiction. Planets with a higher level of detail should occur in these regions. Space should be sub-divided into regions with less detail farther away from observers in the system and the effects of forces based on the contents of each region of space should be overlaid on the map and summed in a concurrent way. There are a lot more details to be addressed, but that's a bit of what I'm working on. I plan on building the system in Rust, Elixir, and/or Pony and setting up a DApp that interfaces with the system and provide the ability to trade items and materials on Cardano, as well as securing snapshots of the state of the system. Using materials and the rules of this system enforced by the DApp should make it possible to share resources between different games.
Note: My other proposal in the Developer Ecosystem category is for work I'm doing to provide a visual way to write Marlowe and Plutus smart contracts:
https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Marlowe-and-Plutus-Mobile/334477-48088
If I get both proposals, I should be able to integrate my work there into this project as a way of in-game scripting. Also, with the funding from both, I should be able to make up the difference in what I need to realize the goals I had from my proposal in Fund2 and get my friends in Malawi to help me work on the projects I've submitted for this round:
https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Cardano-and-FP-in-Malawi/323778-48088
(Three for the price of two!)