Original title: Lattice History

Original link: https://lattice.xyz/history

Original author: Lattice

Translator’s Preface: “Although there have been early attempts at full-chain gaming in the blockchain industry, it must be acknowledged that it was the builders of the Dark Forest ecosystem and subsequent organizations such as Lattice that truly made full-chain gaming an independent track with a solid theoretical foundation and clear direction. After Dark Forest achieved phased success, they established Lattice, MUD, Argus and many other important projects to support the development of the full-chain gaming ecosystem.

So what is the relationship between them? What is the story of Lattice, an important promoter of the full-chain gaming industry? We translated the introduction of Lattice's development history on its official website. From Lattice's development experience, we can better understand the original intentions and ideals of these early promoters. "

01. Seeds (Spring 2021)

In 2020 and 2021, Ethereum and the applications on it began to become more and more complex, but there is still a huge room for improvement in developer tools and the types of projects deployed. Although DeFi is developing rapidly and NFT is still in its infancy, few applications can provide interesting experiences, promote the emergence of new user behaviors, or provide the complexity of the subsequent autonomous world. Ethereum is becoming the world's financial computer, but does it still have a chance to realize its ideal of becoming the world computer?

In that era filled with controversial DeFi forks, liquidity mining, and early NFT games, a new experiment emerged. This experiment was Dark Forest, and it was completely different from other applications deployed on the EVM before. Dark Forest was the first game on the entire chain - the game logic and all data were written on the chain, and the game state could be derived from the chain's history. There were no servers, no intermediaries, only a pure real system provided by the blockchain, and it was open to anyone. Dark Forest was also the first on-chain game to use zkSNARKs to create information asymmetry.

Dark Forest has attracted hundreds of players who were initially attracted by the gameplay and later began to build new clients and plugins for the game. These include an in-game NFT market, plugins that can help players move automatically, a "remote SNARKer" that increases the speed of players opening maps, an exchange that allows users to sell their Dark Forest planet locations, and dozens of other community-developed plugins that enhance core functionality. Dark Forest is becoming a complex network full of emergent behavior.

In 2020, Lattice founder Ludens sent a message to a stranger named Gubsheep, one of the developers behind the Dark Forest game.

Soon, Ludens went to Mexico and began to work with the Dark Forest team. These ideas and attempts promoted the birth of Lattice and MUD in the future.

02. Sprout (Summer 2021 - Winter 2021)

In the summer of 2021, Ludens wanted to make a new game. He teamed up with Alvarius, and the two began working on zkDungeon, a fully on-chain game that was somewhere between a board game and a battle royale. After months of relentless iteration, the team finally had a working demo.

However, there were still some problems. At the time, Ethereum’s development tools couldn’t handle such ambitious applications. Ludens and Alvarius wanted developers building clients and plugins on top of zkDungeon to have a seamless and intuitive experience — but there wasn’t a development framework that made it easy for the community to contribute. We still had some work to do.

03. Breaking Ground: The Birth of Lattice and MUD (Spring 2022 - Summer 2022)

Ludens and Alvarius, with the help of other collaborators, realized that they needed to build an operating system before they could continue developing the game. They needed a framework and protocol to handle more complex game code and eliminate the unfriendly development mode in the traditional smart contract development method. After exploring many game development frameworks, the team discovered the ECS (Entity, Component, System) model, which became the basis of MUD v1 (the team's game engine).

In the spring of 2022, at the D.E.F.C.O.N. conference in Amsterdam, Ludens announced Lattice, a company-based organization. Alvarius presented the MUD and ECS frameworks in more detail. Soon, Lattice was joined by Kooshaba, one of the core developers of the Dark Forest team. We were also joined by Biscaryn, who became our CEO. In the summer of 2022, we were officially established.

That summer, the team began working full-time on MUD. We held a summit in New York and began developing the chain, infrastructure, and services that would become the MUD testnet and MODE, and we began developing a game called MUD War, which became Sky Strife.

In August 2022, Ludens published "Autonomous Worlds (Part 1)" https://0xparc.org/blog/autonomous-worlds, which will become a cornerstone for any team that wants to build complex, emergent systems on Ethereum.

04. Going mainstream (Autumn 2022 - Winter 2022)

In the fall of 2022, when MUD v1 entered a relatively stable stage, we invited a dozen teams to London for an event themed on building games and applications using MUD. We were shocked by the complexity and innovation they demonstrated. Our initial intuition of "needing a powerful operating system to support on-chain applications" was verified.

Internally, the Lattice team is working on a new game called OPCraft, a voxel-based full-chain game that pushes the performance limits of MUD and Optimism (Optimism is an EVM-compatible rollup that deploys OPCraft). In the ten days since OPCraft went live, the game has hosted all sorts of complex activity on the chain—new plugins, custom smart contracts, and even a top leader all appeared when the game went live.

In October 2022, at Devcon in Bogota, the team demonstrated MUD v1 to the public for the first time. Immediately afterwards, we held an 80-person Autonomous World Workshop to demonstrate the capabilities of MUD v1 in more detail. In November, Frolic, one of the most prolific plugin contributors on OPCraft, joined the Lattice team full-time.

05. Continuous Development (2023 - Now)

In the new year, we welcomed five new members, responsible for engineering, operations and product management. Sky Strife's development has entered a good stage, and we have launched a new tutorial for MUD to make it easier for new developers to enter the MUD ecosystem.

We are more focused on improving MUD and building new features to get MUD v2 to a stable state as soon as possible. The core of MUD v2 is modularity: we modularized the data model to bypass the Solidity compiler-driven data storage. We modularized the plugin system to provide more flexibility to developers using MUD. We modularized the sync stack to allow synchronization of contracts and client states, and support the use of SQL to query clients and automatic indexers. We provide continuous feedback for the research and development of MUD v2 through development work on Sky Strife and the needs of other developers who build applications with MUD.

In the spring of 2023, at an event we held in partnership with ETHGlobal, we received over 100 different project submissions from over 400 hackers, all built on MUD v2. We continue to work on MUD v2 as well as many internal projects related to EVM infrastructure.

While there is work in various different directions, our focus remains the same: building products that are developer-friendly and compatible with the Ethereum ecosystem, making it easier for everyone to drive the development of on-chain systems.