XBeam is out!
Over the past year, I have been involved in developing a Cloud Gaming Platform at Oorbit.
So basically, we’ve created a platform that enables developers to upload their Unreal Engine 5 games and share the playable link with their users! The whole distribution process may take 10–15 minutes based on the game size, and after that, users only need to wait 5–10 seconds for Linux games or 20–30 seconds for Windows games to play their favorite games.
Moreover, game developers can now share their Unreal Engine 5 games as playable ads on popular social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and others.
So, what is the difference between us and other gaming platforms?
- Our platform doesn’t rely on game developers’ source codes; it uses shipped binary files.
- It’s fast — I mean, really fast! From the first click to stream, at the worst case, it takes 40 seconds and in the best case it’s only 4 seconds! On other platforms, it takes more than a minute.
- Our input handling is much better than anyone else’s; we’ve made numerous changes on the front-end side to enhance the mouse experience on our platform.
But what have we done? We’ve utilized the world’s most common data centers and cloud platforms such as GCP, AWS, Azure, and others to create GPU clusters. On each GPU instance, we are running 4–8 instances of Unreal Engine 5 games. In our first version, the initial node boot time was nearly 10 minutes, which was a disaster, as we were loading the entire game catalog at boot time! (Imagine downloading 20–25 Docker images, each over 10GB, on a 25G network!) So, what did I do? I created an SMB-enabled NAS with network mirroring for scaling to all regions. Then I created a base Docker image to load the games from the mounted path, and finally, I developed our customized AMI! This whole process decreased the boot time from 25 minutes to 2 minutes and increased the FPS of the games from 45–50 to 60.
We’ve used TypeScript, Go, JavaScript, Python, Kubernetes, and Java during the development of this platform.
You can now run your own Cloud Gaming Platform using Xbeam on AWS.
We are planning to update this product eventually and make more and more parts open source.
