The tech behind Nine Chronicles — part 2
Whenever you press any button in the Nine Chronicles game you may be asking yourself “what happens in the background?” You know that this game feels different from any other you’ve played before and are likely curious to understand how the technology works.
This is the second blog where we describe the technology behind Nine Chronicles. We strongly recommend that you read the first part before reading this one. One of the fundamental concepts in that blog is the idea of translating in-game actions into transactions on the blockchain.
While it is necessary to describe some of the technical components of our software we don’t go as far as including any code or mathematics!
Marketplace
Almost everyone reading this blog will know how to access the marketplace. This is, of course, the place where players can buy and sell items with each other. This is basically a global auction house but without a singular price for each item type.
Upon opening the marketplace screen we can see the items in our inventory on the left and items for sale on the right.
As mentioned in the previous blog, the graphical interface provides a nice way to interact with the data that sits on the Nine Chronicles blockchain. All game data sits on the chain which means a copy of this data is stored by all people who run the blockchain software.
Querying the database
It is worth noting that the storage component of any blockchain is a database. Whenever we want to extract data from a blockchain we are actually querying a database. The game client (where you see the marketplace) is one obvious example of a piece of software that can query the database to find certain lists of data, such as “all items for sale”.
All of the filters that you see inside the marketplace are basically queries coded into the game client itself. However, it is possible for anyone to write their own software that queries the database. Our code is open source and anyone who runs the Nine Chronicles software will have their own copy of the game’s database.
One of the big improvements is the newly released API which is an enhanced set of queries that can be performed against this database. This will be huge for the ecosystem as it will enable players who enjoy dabbling with a bit of code to perform their own queries and even build their own marketplace! This is something that Planetarium would consider funding in the form of a grant. Reach out to the team on Discord to discuss!
One lesser known point is that all of the game items are unique items on the blockchain, this means that all items are NFTs (non-fungible tokens).
Making a purchase
Once you have searched the market and found something you want to buy, then you click on the item and agree to the price by pressing “Buy”. This is perhaps the most obvious time that you expect to make a transaction to the blockchain since you are purchasing something.
As all actions that are stored on-chain, players sign their transaction with their private key. The game client signs the transaction and then sends it to the blockchain node software managed by the launcher software, which in turn broadcasts the transaction to the whole Nine Chronicles network.
This procedure is the same as for combat, except this time the transaction is a purchase of an item rather than the desire to enter combat. All game actions that change the state of the game are recorded as transactions on the blockchain. Our previous blog looked at this process in more detail.
Making a sale
The process of selling is similar to buying. You select an item from your inventory then press “Sell”. This marks the item as “for sale”, which is also a transaction that tells everyone to update their database.
When items are marked for sale, or change ownership, there is an update to the game’s state. It is important that everyone playing the game agrees upon such changes, which is why all such changes are signed by your private key.
Only you have access to your private key which is one reason we have strong guarantees about the authenticity of actions within a blockchain.
True Ownership
In a fully decentralized game, all of the items belong to players in a provable way and given the anti-cheat protections in Nine Chronicles no one can steal or destroy your items. Not even the developers are able to take your items. Anti-cheating protection mechanisms are only found in fully decentralized games, which means that true ownership can only be possible for fully decentralized games.
Many contemporary blockchain games run all of the game logic on a centralized server meaning that the player actions can not be fully verified independently. This is the architecture of traditional online games, which have proven vulnerable to cheating in the past and is in addition to having a centralized point of trust. While the game items should be NFTs on a blockchain, it isn’t so easy to completely verify this, which is why we think true ownership can only exist for fully decentralized games where the entire game logic can be checked independently by anyone.
For more information about our software please see our documentation hub.
Get in touch!
Email us at contact@planetariumhq.com or come say hello on our Discord channel!
About Planetarium
Planetarium is a blockchain company pioneering the ecosystem for community-powered online games. Planetarium’s technology equips developers with powerful tools to create fully decentralized, cross-platform blockchain games that can live forever on networks powered by the players. The team is developing Nine Chronicles, an open source, decentralized role-playing game that launched in October 2020. To learn more, please visit planetariumhq.com.
