Here's the latest demo video of the Quark engine from MetaGravity, which employs "causal partitioning" (more on that below) to enable single shard virtual worlds with massive concurrency. They're showing off that technology later this year with their own Minecraft server, which they say will be able to handle up 100,000 concurrent players. (You can sign up here to request early access.)
Matthew Chuen, Head of Ecosystem at MetaGravity, says they're also able to handle high local concurrency, i.e. the number of avatars in your immediate vicinity:
"We have successfully handled 5,000 players within a 100-square-meter area with excellent performance," he says. "This is possible because our Causal Partitioning technology is fundamentally more efficient than traditional servers, avoiding the exponential lag that typically makes such high-density scenarios impossible."
Without diving too deeply into the technical details, here's how MetaGravity describes Casual Partitioning:
The long-standing challenge in massive multiplayer online games has been the "strong scaling" limit, which ties a game's complexity to a single CPU core. This has traditionally led to fragmented worlds and limited player interactions. MetaGravity's Quark engine bypasses this problem with its "Causal Partitioning". By focusing on cause and effect rather than just 3D space, Quark intelligently syncs only necessary player interactions, eliminating the bottlenecks that have constrained online games for decades.
Matthew believes this tech will make it possible to create gigantic extrapolations of existing game types:
“We expect massive-scale eliminator games, like 'last-man-standing' parkour, to be the immediate draw. They share the high-stakes DNA of Battle Royales, where a huge field of players is whittled down to a single winner. The core challenge isn't just the obstacle course; it's the chaos and emergent difficulty of competing alongside thousands of others.
"From there, the platform will evolve to support massive creative-build contests with real-time judging, and then to epic-scale PvP where entire clans can battle for control over persistent territory."
But their ultimate target is an evolution in virtual worlds:
"The goal is to be able to unlock persistent, MMO-like worlds with player-run settlements, economies, and ongoing conflicts for control.”
And yes, he says Quark can even handle multi-user collaborative building in Minecraft:
"The engine handles numerous players building in close proximity, and we are continuously refining the experience," Matthew tells me. "This technology is designed to empower the incredible ambition we see in the community. For the first time, projects on the scale of 'Build The Earth', which aim to recreate the entire planet in Minecraft, could have hundreds or even thousands of their builders working together simultaneously in a single, seamless world, rather than on separate servers. That's the level of collaborative power we aim to unlock."
All impressive on paper, to be sure. Ultimately it all depends on how impressive this actually is when the beta is open to real players.
And if you're wondering if Quark could handle similar concurrency for Second Life, Rashid Mansoor, CEO of MetaGravity, recently told me: yes.
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