Gaming industry has advanced a lot in the last few years. Looking back games where available in physical devices be it tapes or CDs; however with the likes of Steam, games changed to a digital form. With Steam users no longer had to worry about losing the game or having to protect it from damages; they can simply download the game along with its progress. Steam’s existence solved many problems in the gaming industry.
The blockchain has done the same; the blockchain solved many problems in the financial sector and especially the use of physical money. With the blockchain money became digital and many issues that existed in the traditional financial system were solved.
What if there was a project that merges the two together? Steam and the blockchain?
Gamers community is quite massive and no real number can be put on it; I mean the biggest YouTube channel is of a gamer. The blockchain community on the other hand is also quite massive with more than 40 million holders all over the world. Merging the two together would give exposure to both worlds. With that in mind XMAX chain is set to do that; allowing blockchain developers to develop games for the blockchain and allowing digital currency holders to join the fun.
Now let us take a look at how XMAX is trying to achieve that? Starting from the basics; it is building its own platform and one could argue here that XMAX could just use Ethereum or Bitcoin or other prominent platform to achieve what it is set to achieve. Well! that is not an easy thing to do for various reasons; like the low number of transactions per second and the consensus adopted (like in the case of PoW mining, it is quite slow especially when processing smart contracts, this latter also results in higher fees) and one other important problem with existing solutions is the learning curve. It is not easy developing on Ethereum for example, for one setting the development environment is a hassle let alone developing a smart contract with certain logic.
Those problems limited XMAX from just using an existing platform and opted for its own platform.
Now let us explore how it is solving each of those problems. Starting with the development. XMAX decided to set JavaScript as the programming language on its platform to allow smoother learning curve and faster development cycles. It has created various development tools like the XMAX Studio IDE and XMAX Studio 3D Game Engine. For the low number of transactions per second XMAX opted for the DPOS as their consensus and the side-chain structure.
The DPOS allows for high number of transactions per second and the nodes responsible for generating the blocks are selected from the candidate nodes. When the candidate node submits a sufficient stake they will be given a chance to join the core nodes (the nodes responsible for generating the blocks). The core nodes are 21 nodes. They can change on each cycle. A block on this platform is generated every 0.5 seconds. It takes 15 confirmations to consider the transaction safe.
A thought that might cross/crossed your mind when you read the title is how does XMAX handle intensive operations? The nature of games is different than that in normal financial transactions; it is quite intensive in games and the way XMAX handled that is through what it called side-chains. By moving intensive operations to side-chains and allowing those to provide the necessary resources you are basically relieving the mainchain from running intensive functions in different Dapps on the platform and allowing the mainchain to focus on the block generation. The nodes operating the side-chains can use any consensus other than DPOS. Keep in mind that DPOS is used by the mainchain.
Taking a look back at how this is set up you will realize that the platform is fueling itself. The game developer would need resources to process his/her game and the side-chain miners/operators provide those resources and accordingly the fees are paid to the miners.
I’ve mentioned earlier that XMAX is set to make developers’ lives easy by providing the XMAX Studio SDK which includes a 3D game engine which also supports 2D and HTML5. XMAX also provides the XMAX API to the blockchain and side-chains and the Dapp store where developers can present their work. To make things even more easier they have released a set of templates especially those parts that integrate with the blockchain. So the developers would just work on their logic rather than work on configuring the environment and setting things up.
Resources:
Website: http://xmx.com/
Whitepaper: http://xmx.com/white-papers/XMax_White_Paper.pdf