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WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
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Hi, this is Kuba from Ambient team, I work on Ambient backend.
The servers in question are part of the main Ambient application [0]. The server part is open-source just like the rest of the engine. You can start your own server using native build of Ambient (check cli help for `ambient serve`).
As for the orchestration and creating servers on demand, we are using Kubernetes and Agones [1]. Both of them are open too. We just have a thin API server that receives requests that a server is needed, checks if there's already one running and if not it uses Agones to allocate one.
[0]: https://github.com/AmbientRun/Ambient
Funnily enough, we've never actually been on WebGL! The runtime's built against wgpu [0], which is an abstraction layer that supports the native rendering APIs, WebGPU, and yes, WebGL.
However, our renderer was built with native capabilities in mind (compute shaders!), so we would have had to rewrite it to support WebGL. We decided we'd keep up with WebGPU and see where it takes us :)
In the future, we may write a fallback renderer that's compatible with WebGL/older GPUs, but we wanted to focus on getting our existing renderer working first.
[0]: https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu
You say that being web centric precludes usage on conventional gaming platforms. What about all the games that are PC only anyways? They could use Tauri or whatnot & have incredibly easy time porting to native.
Games such as Battlefield have already used web technology to power much of the game chrome. Taking this a step further doesn't seem like a real constraint. Microsoft themselves are working to extend fast performance webviews to Xbox uwp's. https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/215...
You're also not acknowledging the upside. Plenty of games would love to have an easy-to-make runs-anywhere multi-parryty game. Letting people log in from work or their phone could be a huge advantage to reaching markets. The market of people with access to web browsers is much bigger than the market of console owners!
You're also constraining your thinking to a narrow band in other ways, again ignoring plenty of great potential. Unreal has had huge success gaining entry into all kinds of unexpected spaces; cinema, architecture, events. Engines have a much wider market than just games, and having engines available on a much broader set of modalities than conventional game engines can unlock new use cases. No one's going to build a navigation tool requiring everyone to have a Steam Deck, but if all it takes is a phone then maybe that becomes interesting.
This also seems like an amazing starter kit for education and hobby coders. Wouldn't it be amazing to be able to be a year or two into learning development, and be able to create your own virtual world? That anyone can easily join & access from any device? That potential makes me thrilled.
Maybe this innovation isn't for you & you want to stick to conventional modalities. Fine, great! Don't use this. I for one see a lot of potential & reason for excitement. I think it has plenty of revenue potential, and vast amounts of cool potential.