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The Verse programming language by Epic Games. Also, some creators are possibly making millions of dollars from Unreal Editor for Fortnite

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(They publish Dark Souls)
When GDC happened in March 2023, there was a State of Unreal presentation. One of the segments of the presentation was the introduction of Epic Games new programming language called Verse. There is a one-hour+ video of that segment talking about how the programming language works and what is Tim Sweeney's vision for it:


Not everyone will have time to watch that video so I will summarize a number of things. The Verse programming language is targeted towards video games, 3D simulations and content for the metaverse (not referring to Facebook's metaverse).

Tim Sweeney's definition of the metaverse is: (Transcript of slide)
What is the metaverse?

- Social interaction in a shared real-time 3D simulation
- An open economy with rules but decentralized control
- A creation platform open to all programmers, artists, and designers

It's not a storefront with separately compiled apps: everyone's code and content must interoperate dynamically while updated in a live environment.

Next slide transcript, programming foundation of the metaverse:
The metaverse needs a programming foundation that is...
- Learnable by new programmers
- Compile-time verifiable, runtime safe, a sound basis for an economy
- Open-world interoperable with millions of developers and modules
- Scalable to billions of concurrent users in a shared world
- Designed with rigor sufficient for an open standard

Next slide transcript, the aspiration for Verse:
Our attempt at this is called Verse
The aspiration
- Strongly typed language that builds upon multiple language families: imperative, object-oriented, functional, logic
- Syntax is a mix of C# and Python/TypeScript/Pascal
- Leading edge of static verification

Next slide transcript, why this is considered an ambitious programming language:
We want a programming foundation that is...

Just code
- Don't spread data and logic across SQL queries, networking APIs, AJAX, etc

Transactional
- It's the only plausible way to manage concurrency at a scale of 1M+ programmers

One language
- Support code, data, markup, proofs, etc.

Timeless
- Free of contemporary artifacts
- Free of barriers to evolution towards an ideal language
- Learns from past language successes and mistakes
(Things heard during the video, Tim Sweeney said that Verse will have its own markup language and its own equivalent to JSON called VSON.)

Next slide transcript, evolving Verse:
Specify "ultimate version of the language", MaxVerse
- Research team and contributors are iterating on draft papers with formal specifications

First public release codename BetaVerse is a small subset of this
- It's shipping today!
- Disclaimers: single-threaded, limited performance, limited features.

Each new version must be
- Backwards compatible with code written in past versions
- Forward compatible with MaxVerse plan

During the video they then get Phil Pizio (Director of Language Engineering) on stage to show how Verse works. It's very simple in explanation so it's easy to watch it on the video. Note: Phil says in the video that Verse supports curly braces {} for blocks of code if you do not like using the whitespace indent syntax from Python/Haskell.

There's also a demonstration of it being used in Unreal Editor for Fortnite.

During the video, they put up a slide which says:
The Verse Team

Andrew Scheidecker, Marcus Wassmer, Conan Reis, Markus Breyer, Niklas Röjemo, Keith Miller, Saam Barati, Michael Nicolella, Jason Weiler, Andy Sonnenburg, Robert Manuszewski, Neil Henning, Tim Tillotson, Tom Nonnan, Yi Liang Siew, Filip Pizlo, Stanley Hayes, JP Flouret, Dave Haslam, Kristoffer Jonsson, Kurtis Schmidt, Dominic Couture, Maxime Mercier, Lennart Augustsson, Won Chun, Simon Peyton Jones, Ranjit Jhala, Jay Cotton, Tim Sweeney, Nick Atamas, Mike Beach, Nick Whiting, Jonathan Bunner, Matt Breindel, Chance Ivey, Zabir Hoque, Michael Noland, Michael Daum, Ryan Vance, Dave Ratti, Mike Fricker, Dan Piponi, Dan Mizuba, Allan Schumacher, Anna Fukutome, John Mauney, Michael Karambelas, Holly Lucas, Koen Claessen, Robert Gervais, Sarah Rust, Richard Hinckley, Capen Rhew, Simone DiGravio, Evan Brown

Note: A number of those people on the Verse Team are computer science professors, some of them were even responsible for creating programming languages decades ago.

A Q&A happens and that's it.

If you're curious about learning the Verse programming language, all the documentation can be found in the following domain: https://dev.epicgames.com/documenta...ming-with-verse-in-unreal-editor-for-fortnite

Note: The Verse programming language is currently only accessible in Unreal Editor for Fortnite.

-----------------------------

The second half of this post is about the Fortnite Engagement payout:

Also related, Creator Economy 2.0:

You use the Unreal Editor for Fortnite to make games inside Fortnite. If people play your game, then you could make money (depending on the conditions for that from their policies).

From the Fortnite Engagement payout link:

March and April Recap​

For the vast majority of creators, their first March engagement payout was a significant increase when compared to prior earnings in Epic’s Support-A-Creator program. The top 1000 island creators saw a 5.2x median increase in earnings through engagement payouts over SAC in March.

April’s upcoming engagement payouts (paid starting May 30) will reflect the new changes to the payout formula and will result in an increase of 1.45x more total money paid to creators when compared to March.

When annualized with the new April weighting in place, more than 200 creators would earn more than $100k USD per year through engagement payouts.

And this image is also from that link:
fb-tw-1920x1080-en-1920x1080-03113edc976d.jpg


Make sure you read the fine print in the bottom right corner of that image.

From the rest of that link:
Since launching the Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) alongside engagement payouts in March, new and emerging game genres from creators are becoming popular with Fortnite players. Below is a look at the top 10 most popular categories of games built with UEFN so far, as well as the top 10 overall creator-made genres in Fortnite right now.

Top UEFN Genres by CCU​

Free For All
Team Deathmatch
Gun Game
Horror
Zombies
Lucky Block
Practice
Vehicles
Base Battle
Prop Hunt

Top 10 Overall Genres* by CCU​

Practice
Team Deathmatch
Free For All
Zombies
Base Battle
Horror
Lucky Block
Battle Royale
Prop Hunt
Runner
*(excluding Epic-produced islands)

Some other videos that are related but not as important:

 
saw this earlier today (and posted in the media create thread) but Epic is advertising UEFN in comics and whatnot

 
Where's that xcd comic panel of standards. I don't get the need for this at all, apart from Epic's selfishness in wanting to fully own/lead the dev tools and dev resources of the spatial/3D web. They would love nothing more if Unreal Engine, their language and Fortnite become key backbones to this ecosystem.

The metaverse needs a programming foundation that is...
- Learnable by new programmers
- Compile-time verifiable, runtime safe, a sound basis for an economy
- Open-world interoperable with millions of developers and modules
- Scalable to billions of concurrent users in a shared world
- Designed with rigor sufficient for an open standard

C++ meets nearly all of these use cases and is already globally established and deployed at scale. Then there's the more safe and easier to read/write variant, Rust, which has picked a decent following.

While I appreciate the 3D graphic rendering specific features, current web consortiums are already testing and create new standards for that and they have the benefit of building on top the the current web stack. How is Verse going to integrate with web browsers?
 
Another look at the Verse programming language
A few days ago, a new video was uploaded where Tim Sweeney (CEO of Epic Games) and Simon Peyton Jones (One of the creators of Haskell and the GHC Haskell Compiler, Research Fellow at Epic Games) gave a keynote talk at lambda days (which was held on June 5-6, 2023).

Here's the video:


It's a very technical video explaining the programming language, you are not going to see actual games like from their GDC showcase videos in the OP.

Here's a description from the video:
Keynote talk by Simon Peyton Jones and Tim Sweeney from Epic Games.

Verse is a new programming language, being designed at Epic Games as the language of the metaverse. Verse is a functional logic language, with a bunch of innovative ideas. Like Haskell, Verse is declarative (a variable in Verse stands for just one, immutable value), and higher order (lambdas are first class). But Verse goes well beyond Haskell, with existential variables, unification, expressions that yield multiple values, and much more besides. In this talk we'll give you a sense of what functional logic programming is about, what it looks like to program in Verse, and how we can give meaning to Verse programs using rewrite rules.
 
The part about making all versions backward compatible is interesting, but I think it's a limiting idea.

I use flutter/dart for mobile dev, and their solution is to just highlight what code needs to be updated when a new version comes out
 
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