It was again the same confined space, seemingly unending, yet confined. The same unassuming silhouettes were staring at the same data sets as earlier. Anne had just logged in to the Virtual Conference Room.
“Sorry everyone. It was an urgent matter. Eight-Gen had contacted me.” Anne said.
“Any good news?” Boyce asked, expecting nothing in particular.
“I see our GazeTree running on fumes. What is going on?” Hera was the one to notice at first. When he checked on the performance of GazeTree as a force of habit, his eyes widened in a mild shock, and then it grew. Because he realized that it wasn’t his network alone anymore. It was GazeTree. He always found it very hard to throttle his own network to its limit, as for GazeTree. He couldn’t even imagine putting a dent in its performance, much less throttling it.
“Crap, what the hell are you running?” Snair also chided, and within a moment, panic filled the conference. Regardless, nobody tried interfering with the GazeTree. They all looked at Anne, demanding explanations.
Anne massaged her temples and started, ”I got a delivery from Eight-Gen. CRC had convinced Eight-Gen to help us, so the Game Company sent us a logger. Yes, Boyce, it's good news. But how much good, we have yet to find out.” Anne said to him in a serious tone.
“See, once I got the System-Logger, I was as happy as any of you would have been. I straight away went to the mainframe area and installed the provided firmware. Took a peek in its Logback application.” Anne paused and thought it would be better to show them instead of babbling.
“GazeTree, pause the UEL’s production and start Ulteria’s Logback.”
The room again went dim in a similar manner as it did before. The UI popped up, with GazeTree reading word for word.
[Please choose the output format]
[Tabular representation]
[Visual Representation]
“Tabular Representation,” Anne said, and a 2d array extended till infinity. There were lots of numbers and numbers only in the laid-out hologram of the table. Even the column headings were numbers.
“It’s so comprehensible so I thought it would be better to make it hard by looking at the visual representation.” Anne’s voice oozed with sarcasm, “GazeTree, switch to visual representation.”
The hologram statically switched into a swarm of tiny dots similar to a Mosquito hive. Each dot had its numerical ID. It floated in an endless expanse of space.
“How is this supposed to help us?” Snair asked, and the application exited again.
“It isn’t. The in-built application that came with the logger can’t help us much. Its way of portraying the log and the associated data is so crude. So I thought of fetching data from the firmware itself and asked GazeTree to analyze any APIs available which we can consume directly to draw the data however we want. Here are the results of its analysis.” Anne gestured. GazeTree presented its earlier results on a hologram.
[System-Logger Analysis]
Number of endpoints:
…
Observations:
…
“Holy cow!!!” Hera jumped up in fright, for real.
“Is it that grave?” Snair was genuinely surprised, but at Hera’s reaction instead of the displayed data.
“Grave you ask,” Hera pointed at the details with shivering hands, “I don’t know what actual sorcery they had done to generate this much amount of Data. And we are just looking at the throughput of the System-Logger. No wonder the freaking game is so intoxicating and dream-like. Now I am sure of the reason why we can’t remember much of the details about the game. If they are really injecting even a fraction of the data listed over here in our brain. Much less remember, we should be in a coma after just being logged in for a few seconds in the game. It can literally fry our brains.”
“But CRC is supporting the game, and even trying to cooperate with them. It should be safe right?” Boyce had both his arms crossed, face painted with a worry mask.
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
“It’s already been two months since its launch. No issues were reported, and we have already spent 6 months in-game. I don’t believe anything is wrong with it.” Hera concluded, “I am not concerned about our health care really. We have Terrina, so it would’ve warned CRC and WHO if anything bad had happened with the game and people’s health.”
“It’s just…” Hera continued, but no word came out.
“It’s just hard to imagine that the Eighth-Gen really pulled it off, given the current technological advancement.” Anne completed his words.
Hera snapped back to reality and added, “Even for a moment we ignore Zettabytes of data, I am really curious about the insane frequency range of those QUANTAMIZATION_TICKS.”
Snair wasn’t the one to delve into technical details. She got fed up with those big words so she interrupted, “I understand the sheer scale, and your surprise. But is this thing of any help to us?”
As if on queue, GazeTree notified with a green prompt.
[Ulteri’s Extended Logback is released locally]
“Let’s have a look. Set a timer of 45 minutes,” Anne said to GazeTree and then to Hera with a smirk, “The meltdown time for UEL is 2 hours.”
“Whatt….” Before Hera could express his shock Anne launched the Application.
An explosion happened.
Trillions of particles burst in a dazzling fury, their virtual conference as its origin. If not for it being just a virtual conflagration, they would’ve been vaporized. After a few seconds, things turned smoky, and then as if a lake calming down, a person appeared in front of them in a forest-like scene.
He was lacking every facial feature, colors were so pale, and everything seemed bleached. The grassy path he walked, the trees, the sky, his clothes, and his exquisite equipment. Everything either was rendered with an excessive gray or whiteness, except for one thing: a red dot hovering above his head and his instance ID.
“It’s a player,” Boyce said in a daze.
“Yeah so it seems,” Snair commented.
“Hey GazeTree, where’s the post-processing details? Is the system can’t handle the rendering process despite the data being present?” Hera was confused, if so much geometry data was present, then why was it not being displayed in a better fashion? A little bit of color might have helped them recognize the player.
[Affirmative: The system can’t handle more than what it’s doing, though the reason for missing details is its unavailability. The endpoint GEOMETRY_TRIS only gives base geometry with diffuse colors and intentionally blanched object materials info. Apart from that, there is no post-processing data available.]
“Are you serious?” Anne and Hera exclaimed together. The remark wasn’t intended for GazeTree, and it didn’t answer.
“Anne, can you give me the handles? I would like to measure its depth.” Hera asked and Anne threw the virtual controller discs in her hands towards Hera. Those had appeared once the application booted.
Hera first gave a few swings and pinches to get used to controls. As he maneuvered his hands around, the virtual world rotated around them in full swing. The whole hologram of the logged Ulteria was rotating.
Hera started flapping the controllers with his hands like a bird, and their distance from the first player started growing in height. They were around 300 meters above his head, and they had spotted another red dot with an instance ID hovering over it. The Scale of the font remained constant. Hera gave a few more flaps, and they were a km away from the ground in the sky. A few hundred dots were visible.
The geometry was visible as it usually appeared in Ulteria. Mountains, clouds, rivers, and even the monsters were there. It just all lacked the luster Ulteria had.
“Why do I feel like an omniscient God,” Boyce couldn't help but comment, and a smirk formed on his mouth.
Ignoring the child in the room, Hera continued the perspective shift. After adjusting to Zoom sensitivity, Hera said, “GazeTree, increase the zoom sensitivity by 50% and shift to one hand gesture zoom.”
Now he made a clockwise stirring gesture to zoom out. After a few round gestures of his hand, they were standing in space, out of the planet’s Atmosphere. There were hundreds of thousands of red dots coloring the blanched earth-like planet.
“Why do I feel like this is much more fun than actually playing the game?” Unexpectedly this wasn’t Boyce who commented, but Anne.
“How far does it go?” Hera asked in a serious and confused tone. He zoomed out a bit and panned in the other direction only to see. Another habitable planet. He wouldn’t have noticed it if not for the red dots clogging them. The presence of the Instance IDs made it a mess hard not to see.
Hera looked at Anne, and she commanded, “GazeTree, represent a planet as a green dot, and show the number of instances available in it on the dot.”
A big bright green dot appeared from the planet they started. Similarly, a dot also appeared on the planet which Hera noticed.
“GazeTree, increase the zoom sensitivity by 100%.”
He gave a few more round gestures of his hands. Hundreds of green dots were in front of them. Some in clusters and some alone, each represented a planet and showed the number of players on it.
Boyce’s joviality had left him, Snair was already attentive. Despite Anne’s funny remark a moment ago, she very well knew it was her work environment.
“GazeTree, increase the zoom sensitivity by another 500%. Represent each star-system as a white dot and put the number of planets in it on top of that dot.” Hera commanded, his breaths getting heavier by the second.
This time, there were as many star-system dots in front of them as a cloud of dust with particles. Where each dust particle represented a star system. In fact, if they had cared enough to zoom in and out of the Ulteria’s Logback render mode, they could have seen the same scene. It was intentionally set to a moderate zoom level; the reason it had looked like a mosquito hive.
“It’s a freaking Galaxy. What 90 billion? It could even host trillions of players.” Boyce finally erupted in a shocked voice.