Champagne corks, party poppers, fireworks! We’ve finally started scaling up Desktop. But first things first, supposing you haven’t read our previous issues.
Desktop is shorthand for the new technology for running games on Playkey. Remember that historically our cloud gaming platform runs at game level. Playkey isolates it from the system, intercepting the commands of more than 1,000 system functions, to transmit them to the player’s computer. This kind of architecture, however, is difficult and costly to support. It’s a solution that doesn’t work for decentralization. Miners would have to ensure that their systems work properly, and those systems would inevitably fail once in a while.
Read more to find out why we’ve stuck a Battlefield 1 trailer in here.
We went hunting for a new solution and Desktop turned up. With this format, Playkey takes control not of the game but of the whole operating system – that is to say, the entire desktop. This way, the user gets access to a virtual machine. This architecture provides a simpler (for which read more reliable) way of streaming games and a new level of security. In the Desktop implementation, if the player installs any malware, it’ll be removed the next time it launches.
Our first step will be to migrate our current product to Desktop, which will bring a few more bonuses as well as the advantages already described. Namely:
- In-game microphone support
- Support for additional Steam functionality; for example, chat, overlay, achievements (yes, achievements!)
- Launching games that didn’t work in the previous version of Playkey
- The option for players to change the game resolution
- Game updates with no access restrictions
This is The Crew 2. We couldn’t launch it in the old version of Playkey, but here it is on Desktop, no problem.
Scaling up Desktop means migrating across games and servers that were previously running on the old system. Over the last two weeks we have migrated PUBG and Battlefield 1. So far we have migrated a total of 260 virtual machines out of 500 and 13 of the top 20 games. We intend to get the rest of it done twice as fast, as we’re now confident in the stability of the solution on various hardware and in real-life situations.
PUBG migrated happily to Desktop. Have fun!
As soon as we have migrated the remaining games and servers, we can get down to the detailed design of the architecture and implementation of a decentralized system. First of all, we need to come up with a mechanism to install our software on miners’ computers, establish a secure payment system, and roll out the interface for gamers to choose servers (miners).
We’ll be bringing you all the details here every step of the way, so give us a like, subscribe, and don’t switch over.