GamePress

Niantic Software Engineer Paul Franceus Talks About the Future of AR Gaming

  • 5G is going to improve games
  • Pokemon GO wasn't built optimally at the start, many issues and bug fixes to do

On June 21, 2019, news outlet Software Engineering Daily held an interview with Niantic engineer Paul Franceus regarding many facets of the development of Pokemon GO and it's future. 

Franceus spoke in general about 5G technology improving latency for games:

First of all, the AR system that we’ve built has about a 10 millisecond latency round-trip between the clients. We do hole punching through the mobile network to be able to have the phones be able to talk to each other directly, and there's like a multicasting type of protocol that the devices can all communicate with each other. But this also leads to why we’re so interested in 5G and that we have partnerships with Deutsche Telekom in Germany and EE in England right now, and we’re helping launch their 5G, because we’re going to put servers in the edge so that the players on 5G can have like a 1 millisecond round trip latency.

There was information on the data management in the early days of Pokemon GO:

...I think when we started things out, that we build things in such a way that then we realize that we made some mistakes. So, for example, in a game, you typically have a lot of different pieces of data that you need that all the different parts of different scenes and all that need to have access to, and we had this kind of monolithic thing, and it became pretty clear relatively quickly that that wasn't going to work first of all, because all that stuff is loaded in-memory at the same time and we’re on a limited memory device.

...[Now,] we do something called game state. So, when you're on the map, that things that you need to talk to the map are loaded into memory. When you add an encounter on top of that, we load the encounter state, and those states will stack with each other. Because the encounter, you’re still essentially on the map. So the map state is the base, kind of the base state and then the encounter state comes on that and you have access to those things.

SE Daily - Niantic Real World with Paul Franceus

Franceus also went into detail on what the early days of Pokemon GO were like from a development perspective: 

But then if you think about the nature of what Pokémon was and is, it was all about someone exploring the world and searching for these creatures. So, when we talk to the Pokémon company about doing this, it was just a totally natural fit. Now we actually will have Pokémon actually in the world, but the beauty of it – So there's a couple of things about this. One, because people were outside doing it, it’s not like a normal videogame. A normal videogame, you're in your living room. Nobody sees you playing.

With Pokémon Go, you see 100 people standing around outside looking at their phones. You walk up to them, “What are you people doing?” “Oh! We’re playing. We’re catching Pokémon.” Then because of the single world instance, if I saw a rare Pokémon on my phone, everybody else saw the same Pokémon in the same place and was able to catch it. So you had this kind of social phenomenon.

For more of what Franceus said, check out the full transcript below, as well as a reddit summary from u/Optofire.

Full Interview Transcript PDF