Project Overworld

After their supply rocket landed on the Moon, the members of Spacol got back to their tasks with Keith, Jim and Tyler taking care of the water pipeline and the others expanding upon their Moon base.

Though, after that first group ran out of aluminum sheets, Keith decided that they should be joining their second team onto the construction of the base. They had already braided enough burlap bags for the next few weeks and they had no reason to make any more for the time being. In any case, the most important objective was to finish their Moon base so they could have a more comfortable stay on this natural satellite.

- "So, when are you supposed to begin your new job?" Leyla inquired.

Since Keith first talked about the interaction he has had with a human resources manager of the NASA, his friends could not stop asking about what he would be doing.

- "He's still filling up some paperwork, but he's told me that everything would be ready in under a month." He tried avoiding the subject as best he could. However, the more Leyla dag into the subject, the more precise her questions became. It was almost as if she understood Keith was hiding things away from them.

Fortunately, he has been able to maintain the surprise up until now. As long as Leyla did not talk about it with other Spacol members, he was fine with her being skeptical. As for the progress of Horace's negotiation, Keith has not heard a lot about him in the last few days. He was being kind of optimistic about this whole situation and always told Keith that everything was going flawlessly.

'Well, let's just give him some time to take care of this complex situation.' Keith meditated. 'He's essentially asking for four people to be recruited and two more in a few years of time.' Even though the NASA was a large government organization, they too had to respect budgets and choose their employees wisely.

What surprised Keith the most, actually, was the amount of trust Horace put into him. He was spending a lot of his time trying to convince his superiors to recruit him and his friends on the sole base that Spacol had accomplish some feats inside a video game. Sure, Project Overworld was more of a simulation than a video game, and it also aimed to reproduce a lot of the real world physics, but there was no proof about that yet.

'Well, they must have conducted some sort of tests inside Project Overworld at some point. I don't think they'd take a bet by recruiting random players to accomplish things for their company.' Keith concluded. In fact, this whole situation gave him a huge confidence boost. He has not been able to test a lot of his knowledge in the 'real world' because he has been so focused on developing inside the game, but he now felt like he could be accomplishing some interesting things as long as he had the resources to do so.

'Let's just hope Horace comes back with some good news.'

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- "Welcome to this new edition of Inventopia!" Amber exclaimed before her audience. They had yet to develop complex intercontinental communication, but the first iteration of a giant screen has been developed inside the huge arena of the Midgard's colosseum. After the success that has become 'Project : Vanilla', Amber partenered with a few audio-visual companies to install screen inside the hub leading to the arena of her favorite game.

Thanks to this fact, the technology within Yggdrasil improved leaps and bounds before spreading to other continents. In any case, today was supposed to be held another edition of Inventopia focused on computer science. People would be showcasing their new and improved machines to the public while some others may take some time to convince everyone about the usefulness of their software.

At least, those were the hopes of Amber who decided to organize this event after over four months of not holding any contests.

- "Today, we will elect the best computer scientists of them all, and Project Overworld will hopefully undergo another huge leap in technology! Let the 21th iteration of Inventopia begin!"

The crowd cheered in hype of the upcoming event as contestans started parading inside the huge arena now equipped with several camera displaying their images with almost no delay on screen. The first few seemed pretty similar as they introduced new and improved computer desings to the public. It was kind of boring for neophytes but interesting and orginal ideas soon popped up.

After another few hours, the persons she was looking forward to finally showed up. In fact, this team of three people were part of the large group that was taking care of the 'World Wide Web' project. She personally selected some of them, leaving the human resources management to a trustworthy person, and knew of their incredible feats inside this game.

Partenering with Starise for satellite communication, they were supposed to announce a revolutionary advancement in this event. As she could not stand it anymore, Amber straightened up in her seat to have a better view of both the arena and the screen that showcased a zoomed-in view of the computer that was being installed there.

- "Hello Midgard citizen and other Project Overworld players who joined us inside this colosseum for today's event! Not to forget all of you watching at home thanks to the livestream organized by the municipal team of this beautiful city." One of the team member introduced himself in a solemn manner. "Today, we wanted to show you the progress that has been made concerning intercontinental communication." The man pursued while one of his team members turned on the computer.

At this point, the audience's interest was piqued and not a single sound could be heard throughout the gigantic colosseum.

- "As part of the official Computational Administration of Midgard, abbreviated CAM, we've being working with Starise to develop a new way of communicating across long distance, and that is using the satellites currently orbitting around the Earth. That is why, today, we will be showing you images taken from the other side of the globe and even moving a remote controlled car from such a distance."

Waving to his comrades, the man got closer to the computer and started typing a few things on the keyboard. A few seconds later, the large screen place throughout the colosseum started broadcasting the screen of the computer directly.

Murmurs of surprise ran through the assembly as they witnessed such technological improvements. To broadcast the computer's data onto other screen was already a pretty impressive feat because it meant the computer could be communicating with several objects at once without being directly connected to them. However, this was only the beginning of the show.

The screens suddenly started displaying a really familiar view, that of the Lionheart's harbour. Cheers could be heard throughout the public, as some people showed up on the other end of the screen and waved directly at the camera. One of them put a sign in front of it stating that they were ready for the demonstration.

The man equipped with a microphone spoke again, this time to ask for a person from the audience to come onto the stage.

- "Since this is a demonstration, I wanted to prove that nothing about this is staged. Anyone interested in participating in the next technological improvement?"

Several hundreds, nay thousands people all manifested their interested by standing up or raising their hand. In the end, only a few dozen of them were chosen and brought onto the stage by security members. Using the controler handed to them by the man, every single one of them managed to make a vehicle the size of a dog move around from the other side of the planet.

The cheers of the assembly surged once more for the impressive demonstration of intercontinental communication showcased by this team, and the event ended as a roaring success.

'They did manage to do it, in the end!' Amber rhapsodized. I can't wait for every city in this world to be able to freely communicate with each other. This is only the beginning, but I'm pretty certain we'lle be able to accomplish impressive feats inside this advance simulation!'

_______________

'This is bad!' One of the lead developers of Project Overworld thought. Recently, things had escalated quickly inside their simulation and players were developing more complex and resource-consuming technologies than ever.

Up until now, they had thought of the possibilty to host calculations onto their user's own computer, meaning the server would not have to go through all of these itself. However, what would happen if there were no players around problematic objects? Could they be dividing all the calculations across the entirety of Project Overworld's playerbase connected at a time? This was not a conceivable solution since people would be wondering why they were lagging out for no reason. Also, things would get pretty dire around less populated hours.

In any case, simulating this world already consumed a lot of the computational power delivered by your better than average personal computer, so they could not be hosting any more calculations whatsoever. They had recently invested into a more powerful infrastrucure, but it would not be profitable in the long term if they were to replace it all every few months.

They could alternatively block off any complex calculations from being emulated inside their game, but a lot of their users would be disappointed by such limitations, leading to a drop in the game's popularity. For now, all they could be doing is simplifying the way electricity would be moving inside small devices so computer would be requiring less calculations overall.

- "We need to find a solution; and pretty quickly at that!" Erickson pressed his team. Being one of the lead developers of this game proved to be a really stressful job that he would happily swap out for anything else; if the pay was similar to the one he currently perceived, though.