Fontus

A multiplayer virtual world that exists on the Ethereum blockchain.

Inspiration

The problem with those experiments, was all the land ownership records were hosted on my own server - and that meant no-one really owned their land - I was building a walled garden, and that’s not how I imagined the metaverse.

Enter Ethereum

By storing this data in Ethereum, it meant that the world was truly decentralised, it wasn’t relying on any one server to record who owned what, those ownership records were all on the Ethereum block chain.

Polygons and the Blockchain

The next problem was how to host the content that was on those scenes. A single small parcel can be 100's or 1000's of kilobytes in size, and you can’t store that much data on the Ethereum blockchain, so I needed a decentralised way of storing parcel data, including the .obj files, .jpg textures, sounds and scripts.

IPFS — The Interplanetary File System

If I was going to built a permanent metaverse for people to visit and explore, I needed a permanent way of hosting the content, and IPFS was it.

You can upload a parcel to the IPFS network and it will be hosted by all the nodes running IPFS, there is no longer just one server hosting your content, it is there forever, referenced by a hash like this:

So now we have two of the necessary components for a decentralized virtual world, land ownership in Ethereum, and content hosted on IPFS.

Web Real-Time Communication

The final component of the puzzle was presence, seeing and hearing other people that are in the virtual world.

With my previous work, I had made a node.js server that connected all the players together using websockets. However, if I did this for Fontus, it would mean running hundreds of servers so that players could see a shared world together. I wanted to avoid this, and instead turned to WebRTC, so players could connect directly to each others computer and share their positional information.

Using WebRTC, and a lightweight signalling server, your browser connects directly to other players, and shares chat messages and positional information. Because this is a high bandwidth, direct connection, in the future you will be able to voice chat and share content with each other.

Creating Content

In the future, I want to create an exporter for Blender so that you can upload directly to IPFS and instantly update your parcels in the world.

Roadmap

Parcel sales

The world is limited to a maximum of 1,048,576 parcels, distributed in a 1024x1024 grid. Parcel sales will start at the origin (0,0) and move outward.

New users will be dropped near the origin, and over time we will develop transportation infrastructure to distribute people through the world to interesting neighbourhoods.

About me

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