SURREAL 2: Surreal Photon
SURREAL 2 was a 3D virtual events platform built on Unreal Engine, part of the metaverse industry that sprang up during the COVID lockdowns. Attendees explored events as third-person avatars. Surreal Events brought me on in 2020 based on my Brickadia work to build this version of the product. SURREAL 1's netcode was fragmented, with no standard way of writing it, so I decided straight away to rewrite the core networking from scratch and give everyone one system to use.
SURREAL has since moved on from the Unreal Engine-based SURREAL 2 to in-browser rendering, but the custom net driver that made SURREAL 2 work, Surreal Photon, remains one of the coolest projects I've ever worked on. Normally, Unreal Engine developers using Photon have to call it by hand and do all their networking themselves. With my Surreal Photon plugin, they could use Unreal's normal networking (RPCs and UPROPERTY replication) and it just worked!
Details
- Surreal Photon (SRP). Designed and implemented a ground-up rewrite of SURREAL 2's core networking.
- Engine integration. Built a custom Unreal Engine net driver for Photon, Exit Games' room-based networking platform, creating the replication foundation the product needed.
- Longevity. SRP became SURREAL's core networking layer and powered all of its public projects for almost three years.
- Digital Truist Park. SRP powered Digital Truist Park, the Atlanta Braves' virtual recreation of their stadium and The Battery Atlanta, streamed to fans' browsers. The event supported over 1,000 concurrent attendees, with SRP splitting people into their own instances of each map. Players with special account types, such as event administrators, could even be seen across servers around the world.
- Ownership. The role combined multiplayer architecture, engine integration and production ownership across the project. I also trained other employees to use it.
