Parallel worlds in massively multiplayer online art (MMOA)

TheBroth utilizes the concept of parallel worlds in order to provide for hundreds of users to play in the same room simultaneously. This article explains why and how.

Most massively multiplayer online games (including MMORGs, MM online role playing games) implement the notion of parallel worlds, sometimes called “shards”. A shard is an instance of an online world in which subsets of online players play together, as opposed to absolutely all players acting in the same persistent world at the same time.

For applications like TheBroth, where each room is made of “only” 1000 tiles, the reasons to use “parallel worlds” are imminently obvious:

Imagine you’d have hundreds of people at the same time in a room. That’d be utter chaos! Moving tiles together, chatting, all that becomes practically impossible if there is too many people in the same mosaic. Too many cooks spoil TheBroth, quite literally.

Parallel worlds branch off the old world

When a room gets too busy, half the people in the room are being split off into a “parallel universe” of sorts.

Basically, a new mosaic “set” is being created. Amongst TheBroth developers, we call these things “sets”. Every room has at least one set, in other words, one instance of one mosaic made of 1000 tiles plus the players that are currently playing in that mosaic set.

Upon splitting, the newly created set has the exact same tile positions, and so a new, parallel world is branching off the old world.

Silent creation of a parallel world without a big bang

The interesting thing about the set splitting into a parallel set is that the new branch or version of the same art is being created without the players even noticing. Nothing about the room changes, there is no big bang - it all happens completely silently, behind the scenes.

For both half of the players, it just looks like the other half of players suddenly left, without as much as saying goodbye!

New players that visit a room that has several sets (as /mosaic usually does) will be placed in the sets with the lowest number of players. Sets that are already at maximum capacity are avoided.

Where parallel worlds go to die…

When there are more mosaic sets than are required to hold all the users in a room, then some sets are being marked for deletion. No new players are being placed in these sets, and when the last person leaves, the set self-combusts without a trace. “Poof!”, gone.

Of course, when new players arrive and other sets are already at full capacity in terms of number of players, these marked-for-deletion sets will be unmarked so they can receive new players again.

If you’re the last person in a mosaic set, and you leave the room, then this set will be deleted because nobody is in it. So if you’re the last user and you want to take a snapshot of your artwork, you better be quick or the set is gone before you know it! Then, when you enter the room again, it will look completely different, as you’re being placed in an existing set with no way of taking a snapshot of the previous set you were in. Pressing “back” in your browser won’t help since the act of taking snapshots is basically storing a copy of a set as a snapshot, and the set doesn’t really exist anymore on TheBroth server. What’s in your browser is just a dead and useless reflection of something that no longer exists.

The secret of surprisingly good art coming from the public room

The following explains why there is sometimes good art being created in the public mosaic room:

When there are more sets than necessary to hold all players, the set with the least amount of players gets marked for deletion. Sets marked for deletion will not get an influx of new players.

Drive-by bullies that just want to destroy stuff usually don’t stay long, and the players that remain active in the set are typically those that enjoy working together. And so it comes that pretty good artworks are then possible even coming from a public room!

About the mystery of suddenly ending up in a different mosaic

Many players had been wondering how it is possible that they leave a mosaic room for only a minute, and when they come back, the room is completely different! This could have hardly been the work of some particularly industrious artists - it must be a different room, right?

And indeed it is - not really a different room though, as it has the same URL and the banners and everything in the room is the same - you’re just in a different set of the room!

At the time of writing this, there is no mechanism for users to choose the set they want to go in. This is typically not a problem, as individual non-public rooms (there are 5,000 rooms on TheBroth!) rarely get so full that new sets are being created, and so there is only one set for these not-so-busy rooms. The public room at /mosaic however is different, as there’s always a great number of sets that coexist.

Having said that, of course TheBroth admins can already monitor and enter any sets they want. We’re soon polishing this feature up and make it accessible to all users. Read on…

Set surfing, the new TheBroth sport

So what does the future hold? Well, for one we’ll be able to offer a thumbnail preview of the most active rooms. Yep, this includes all the multiple sets of a room, should they exist. And yes, it will be possible to selectively enter any set at will, even full ones!

And, you’ll be able to see exactly who is in which room, so you can literally stalk other users around TheBroth. Whether that’s a good thing remains to be seen - we’ll then probably need another new feature to render yourself invisible, so your whereabouts are not shown on any room lists or player lists.

Lost in parallel worlds… TheBroth way :-)

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Update update update - we now DO have set surfing as described. Check it out here on the active rooms page!

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