Tim Sweeney
speaker
640 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Tim Sweeney’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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If you absolutely maxed out a server, maybe today you could get it up to 140 or something. But, you know, it's not going to thousands or millions or billions. And so what we need is a technique for magically automatically scaling our code. And transactions are the idea. And the idea is a transaction is a granule of code that runs its entirety.
And so the idea of this transactional memory concept is that we're going to have programmers write completely ordinary code that reads and writes variables in the completely ordinary way, and they're not going to have to worry about concurrency at all. And then the system, like today, a computer just runs your program. There's no amount of speculation going on at the programming language level.
The idea of transactions is, since we have a bunch of operations we need to know we apply, we apply a large set of them concurrently, but instead of each one reading and writing from global memory shared by all, in which case they might be reading and writing and contending with each other for the same data and might be doing contradictory things to it, we're going to
track all of our writes locally. We're not going to write changes out to global memory. We're going to keep track of it in a buffer that's just for that one transaction.
So it's going to look to that code exactly as if it's running on the global system affecting global game state, but it's going to be isolated to just that one transaction, and it's going to be set aside and buffered up for consideration later. We're going to run tens or hundreds or thousands of these updates concurrently. We're going to see which ones had read-write conflicts.
Because if two transactions don't read and write any of the same data, then you could have run them in either order or simultaneously, and it wouldn't have changed the end result. Yeah, the order doesn't matter. This is so fascinating.
Yeah, exactly. And the key is that you're running these updates speculatively, and you're not committing their changes to memory until you're sure that they're free of conflicts. So you might update 10,000 objects. You might find 9,000 of them were conflict-free. So you apply those 9,000 updates to memory. And they could have run in any order, and it wouldn't have changed the result.
Now there's a thousand objects left over. Now you have to run those again, try them, maybe interleave in a different way to get them to eventually commit to memory. And in the meantime, you just throw all their computations away and redo them later.
And by doing this, like removing this from being a programming problem for the programmer to deal with to being a language problem for us language designers to deal with. And we're moving a vast amount of pain that would be imposed on a million people instead to a vast amount of pain in small...
Well, there's a lot going on in parallel. The key thing with Verse is that we have been specifying what we think is the ultimate version of the language with all the features we want, whereas we've been chipping more modest versions of the language over time. And we've released dozens of updates to it over the past year and a half.
And the idea is that the shipping version gains more and more features over time, but each maintaining backwards compatibility with old versions and each continuing to improve and approach the ultimate version of it as we go. And we've been doing this experiment entirely within the world of Unreal Editor for Fortnite for now.
We want to test this and iterate with Fortnite creators in just the metaverse usage case before we make it available to all of our partners using Unreal Engine for all of their projects. And the idea is to iteratively improve it and build it out. Because right now, UEFN has relatively few features for programming. It needs a lot more.
And everything we add makes the world a much better place for Fortnite creators. And we're adding major, major new APIs every few months throughout the course of this year. Whereas Unreal Engine licensees who are building standalone games already have access to the full engine through C++. They have massive, massive expectations of an API.
And so we can't release this to them until we've built up all the essential features that they'll need for building their gameplay in the future. And so we have these two different tendrils of progress. There's Unreal Engine 5 for game developers, and there's Unreal Engine 5 targeting the Fortnite community.
And there's different bits of development that are only in one area of it that aren't applied to both. Not all of the Unreal Engine 5 features are actually available in Fortnite, because some of them we haven't figured out or haven't gotten to the point where we can deploy them to all seven platforms in a platform-independent way.
And so the place where all of these different threads of development come together is Unreal Engine 6. And it's a few years away. We don't have an exact time frame. But we could be seeing preview versions of it perhaps two to three years from now. And we're making continuous progress towards it.
The aim for UE6 is to bring the best of both worlds together. Much easier gameplay programming for the Fortnite community and for licensees. More scalability to large-scale simulations of all sorts. Greater ease of use, meaning it will be easier to hire programmers who are familiar with and experienced with the thing.
but also ensure that every game developer has the full deployment capabilities so that it can build a game once and then ship it anywhere.
The ultimate version of this enables a game developer to build a game of any sort, either or simultaneously both ship it into Fortnite as a Fortnite island that players can go into, bring their Fortnite items and cosmetics and interoperate properly, or ship as a standalone game or both. And if they ship as a standalone game,
They shouldn't be missing out on the open economy either, because in this time frame, we'll have opened up the Fortnite item economy to third-party developers of all sorts.
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