Author here. I had a chat with PHV about this (a principle author of the Local First Software paper).
He sees the access control problem like scribbling on your copy of the US Constitution. If you print out the constitution, you can make whatever marks on the page that you want. But nobody else is obliged to copy your changes.
Its the same as Git in that sense. I can fork a repository and submit pull requests. But I can only push my changes upstream if I have write access to the repository.
If you need a single authoritative "truth" - like a video game - then you can still do that by having one peer act as a hub and it can decide which edits to merge & broadcast. If a video game used a CRDT, you might still want a server - and that server might still want to reject any incoming edits that are older than a few seconds.
But I generally agree - I don't think CRDTs add a lot of value in multiplayer video games. CRDTs make sense when a local user wants to edit some data, and those changes are useful locally even if you never share them with other peers. So, creative work is the use case I think about the most - like video editing, writing, design, programming, and so on.
In the video game industry, I think the best use for CRDTs would be to make Unity / Unreal / etc collaborative spaces.
> In the video game industry, I think the best use for CRDTs would be to make Unity / Unreal / etc collaborative spaces.
Unreal has a collaborative implementation - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPIpOdNmNGE It's demo'ed here for Virtual Production. I believe that it's called the "concert framework" in the engine itself. I'm unsure what it's implemented based on though.
He sees the access control problem like scribbling on your copy of the US Constitution. If you print out the constitution, you can make whatever marks on the page that you want. But nobody else is obliged to copy your changes.
Its the same as Git in that sense. I can fork a repository and submit pull requests. But I can only push my changes upstream if I have write access to the repository.
If you need a single authoritative "truth" - like a video game - then you can still do that by having one peer act as a hub and it can decide which edits to merge & broadcast. If a video game used a CRDT, you might still want a server - and that server might still want to reject any incoming edits that are older than a few seconds.
But I generally agree - I don't think CRDTs add a lot of value in multiplayer video games. CRDTs make sense when a local user wants to edit some data, and those changes are useful locally even if you never share them with other peers. So, creative work is the use case I think about the most - like video editing, writing, design, programming, and so on.
In the video game industry, I think the best use for CRDTs would be to make Unity / Unreal / etc collaborative spaces.