Note

Playerchains are a peer-to-peer network architecture for running responsive, multiplayer games that are decentralised and verifiable.

We’ve built a demo game you can play!

Download and start a playerchain with your friends

Tip

By playing the game together, you and your friends become nodes on your own playerchain.

Why Playerchains?

Playerchains are a way for players to have full control of their own responsive, multiplayer games without relying on anyone or anything beyond their own gaming machine.

⚖️   We’re interested in moving control of your games away from corporations back to you!

🖥️   For multiplayer games, that means removing the reliance on central servers.

⚛️   Public blockchains are decentralised, but you still rely on external compute. This is expensive and constrains performance.

✅   Playerchains remove reliance on anyone outside your game’s group.

Read more about why we think playerchains are cool here

How do Playerchains work?

🤝   Games built on playerchain netcode allow the player's machines to connect and share inputs in realtime.

📒   Each player maintains their own history of actions and connected players combine this into a DAG.

⏱️   Cutting edge distributed systems protocols ensure everyone agrees on the inputs with fast finality.

🔮   Game logic runs in deterministic lockstep with prediction and rollback; an established netcode pattern.

🔏   Inputs are cryptographically signed, so gameplay and results are provable and allow for player attestations.

⛓️   This unlocks interop with blockchains, leaderboard servers, community tools, or other playerchain games.

👑   Each player maintains their own sovereign blockchain with an immutable history of their actions.

⚛️   The individual chains combine to form an emergent blocklace.

🌍   This global lattice, with a plurality of partial views, opens up new possibilities for connecting worlds.

💬   If you have comments or feedback, we'd love to hear from you! Come speak to us in discord

You can take a closer look at the architecture here

Contributors

Todo

• Instructions to build and run from source
• Host a prebuilt ssc from the Playmint/Socket fork
• Licensing info
• Guidance for contributors

To build and run from source

Warning

building ssc has platform specific dependencies that we don't document, but we hope to provide a prebuilt install package in future.

build ssc from the playmint-next branch of playmint/socket

macos:
rm -rf build; ./bin/clean.sh && NO_IOS=1 NO_ANDROID=1 VERBOSE=1 ./bin/install.sh

windows:
rm -force .\build\ ; .\bin\install.ps1 -verbose

then ...

• run pnpm i to install stuff
• run pnpm dev to run dev build with hmr or npm start to run dev build close to prod
• run pnpm build to build prod (but you will need an apple id setup - the github action does this for you

References & Inspiration

• 📝   Blocklace paper
• 📝   Cordial Miners paper
• 📝   Latica p2p protocol