What is Verse? Fortnite developer Epic Games launches its programming language

After launching Fortnite Chapter 4 Season 1 utilizing Unreal Engine 5.1, Epic Games is ready to unveil its pièce de résistance. In a post on Twitter made by the game's Creative account, the Unreal Editor of Fortnite, otherwise known as Creative 2.0, is ready to be revealed. At 2:00 pm Eastern Time on December 15, a live showcase will be hosted on Twitch.

While the highlight of this mini-event will be the Unreal Engine in all its glory, there's yet another major advancement that will be shown off. A programming language called Verse will also make its debut.

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Verse will help build Fortnite's Metaverse

Verse is a new programming language for creating websites that follow the Web3 standard. It's a functional-logic language with an open-source declarative with an uncommon static sort architecture.

The reason behind this new programming language's development is Tim Sweeney's vision of the metaverse. In the presentation, five points were mentioned, which highlighted their goals. They are:

• Social interactions in a shared real-time 3D simulation
• An open economy with rules but no corporate overlord or entity presiding over things
• A creation platform open to all artists, designers, and programmers,
• Much more than a collection of separately compiled, statically linked apps: everyone’s code and content must interoperate dynamically, with live updates of running code
• Pervasive open standards. Not just for Unreal Engine but any other game/simulation engine, e.g., Unity.

In addition to the above points, Verse aims to revolutionize the programming language. It aims to be easier to learn, and the end goal is to grow over time without breaking itself. Here are some more pointers from the presentation:

• Scalable to running code and written by millions of programmers who do not know each other, that supports billions of users
• Transactional from the get-go, which will be the only plausible way to manage concurrence across 1M+ programmers
• Strong interop guarantees over time and compiled time guarantee that a module subsumes the API of the previous version
• Learnable as a first language
• Extensible: mechanisms for the language to grow over time without breaking code.

Much like Metaverse's vision, Verse will also be open. Developers will regularly publish papers and share information that anyone can use. They will also offer compilers, verifiers, and runtime under permissive open-source licenses. The best part about this is that there will be no IP encumbrances.

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What does this mean for Fortnite Creative 2.0?

For one, players will have more creative freedom to create and add their ideas to the Metaverse. Despite the current methods being good, they are limited. With the introduction of Unreal Engine for Fortnite and Verse, this process will be more streamlined.

With the promise of creators being able to profit off their own creations in the pipeline, a lot of good will come to this. That said, both are still a work in progress and will take some time to mature in terms of stability and usability.

While early adopters may encounter minor speed bumps along the way, being a part of this growing ecosystem will no doubt benefit them in the long term. Although Fortnite is now five years old, the journey of the Metaverse is just getting started.