Full-chain gaming becomes the market focus, in-depth analysis of the pioneering project Dark Forest.

Full-chain gaming market focuses on Dark Forest's pioneering project analysis.

Dark Forest is a decentralized strategy game based on the Ethereum blockchain. Players can gather resources, build bases, develop technology, collect weapons, and engage in battles with other players to compete for resources.

In Dark Forest, each player owns their own planet and needs to gather resources, build bases, and develop technology to enhance their combat capabilities. Players can use resources to produce buildings, research technology, and manufacture weapons facilities in order to gain advantages in battles.

When players fly in interstellar space, they need to constantly scout and explore to discover other planets and resources. When two players discover the same planet at the same time, they can choose to attack the planet or choose to escape. In an attack, players need to use their weapons to attack the opponent’s base and seize their resources.

The feature of Dark Forest is that the game is entirely based on blockchain technology. Each player’s planet and resources are stored on the blockchain and cannot be tampered with or deleted. In addition, Dark Forest is also a decentralized game (DeGame) without a central server controlling the game process, but is maintained and decided by all players together.

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Dark Forest is also the first game in the fully decentralized game to introduce a fog of war system, which has been affirmed by Vitalik Buterin. We will delve into this real-time strategy game in this article to explore how it is implemented in a fully chained environment. From time to time, @DfArchon will hold “Community Rounds”, and interested students can also participate in testing. Let’s start with the game types and compare MMORPG and MMORTS games:

• MMO-RPG game: Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, open world, the game has no end, the fun of the game lies in the immersive experience of the storyline and the metaverse game world. For example, World of Warcraft.
• MMO-RTS game: Massively Multiplayer Online Real-Time Strategy game, relatively small closed world, the game has a beginning and an end in each round, the fun of the game lies in the multiplayer confrontations within the story background, and requires strategy to obtain resources, develop, and then eliminate enemies. Typical representatives include StarCraft and Warcraft, with a round lasting 20-40 minutes.
• DF is an MMORTS game, because many people can participate at the same time (up to thousands of people), and the blockchain TPS is limited, so each round lasts about 10 days. The victory or defeat is determined by the ranking based on ladder scores, with scores mainly obtained from resources obtained in the game (freely obtained in PVE and plundered in PVP). During the game pause period, users cannot interact with the game contract.

Live Trading

In the beginning, only the Official Round held by the official team required an invitation code (key) to participate. Now, with the lobby feature, anyone can create their own round, so there is the so-called community round (similar to a competition organized by the community). Go to the homepage https://zkga.me/ and click “Create Lobby” to enter the Lobby settings page, as shown in the following figure.

Game settings: You can modify the game speed by changing the recovery speed of energy/silver coins and the sailing speed.

World Size: You can change the size of the map by modifying the radius of the universe.

SLianGuaice Type & Biome: Select the game map.

Planets: Set the basic parameters of the planets.

Player sLianGuaiwn: Generate parameter settings for players.

SLianGuaice junk: Parameter settings for this game item.

Capture zones: Parameter settings for occupied areas.

Artifacts: Parameter settings for this game item.

Admin permissions: Set whether to allow whitelist players.

Advanced Snarks: Parameter settings for war fog.

For more tips on using the Lobby, please refer to this official answer:

https://blog.zkga.me/introducing-dark-forest-lobbies

Dark Forest may seem complex on the surface, but its basic game rules are simple: planets have energy values, which decrease with distance. Jumping between planets is an attack on each other, and the winner is determined by the size of the energy value after decay. Of course, there are already many articles and videos explaining how to play the game, so I won’t go into more details here.

Developer Documentation Analysis

The developer documentation provides some framework explanations for the game, targeting plugin developers, web client developers, game contract developers, and ZK circuit developers.

Connect to the Blockchain

The game runs on xDai’s layer2, which is the current Gnosis Chain. Because the game requires a lot of interaction with contracts during runtime, it has built-in RPC nodes. The Gnosis team even opened a dedicated node for this game.

Plugins

Dark Forest allows players to customize the default web client through a plugin system. Plugins are code snippets that players can write to generate alternative views of game data, automate common game processes, and even redesign game skins. Essentially, Dark Forest allows players to interact with the web client in any way they like through programming.

Mining

The key mechanism of Dark Forest is its cryptographic war fog. When you first join the game, you don’t know the positions of other players. Players must calculate hash values to discover points of interest in the universe, such as planets and the positions of other players. These hash values are stored in the browser’s local storage and are treated as secret data. By default, the Dark Forest default web client uses a single-threaded JavaScript miner to explore the universe, but you can take various measures to increase the hash rate, such as changing the CPU core next to the mining button. If you try to set the number of cores to be greater than the actual number of cores on your computer, your mining performance will level off.

When a player’s miner discovers a cosmic region map, the web client will save the information related to these undiscovered regions to the browser’s local storage. Dark Forest stores the data in IndexedDB. Players can also act as mining workers exploring the location map by running a remote server.

Snarking

Dark Forest is supported by ZK-Snark technology, which is a cryptographic technology used to prove the correctness of a function without revealing the function’s inputs or logic. Dark Forest uses this technology to verify the validity of movements in the game without disclosing the location of the planets to those peeking into the chain. This technology (Zk-snark Proof Generation) is computationally expensive! So the ZK-Proof computation is moved outside of the browser, requiring a local Node.JS to run. Of course, the game also allows running this service on a remote server.

Summary

As an extremely innovative blockchain game, the development of Dark Forest seems to be slow. One possible reason is that it is a community-driven project, which ensures decentralization but also affects development efficiency. The last official round was in February 2022. The web client was last updated in October 2020, while third-party (community) plugins have been slightly more active, including the night market (anonymous trading of planet coordinates) in July 2022 and the lobby in March 2022.

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