Cardinal is a World Engine game shard framework for building powerful, highly scalable onchain games.

Through the World Engine’s shard communication interface (SCI), Cardinal interoperates seamlessly with EVM smart contracts on the World Engine stack, providing web2 scale performance for onchain games while preserving interoperability.

​
Key Features

  • High-performance - Cardinal is how a blockchain would be constructed if it was designed for games. It can handle thousands of game moves per second in real-time.
  • Highly customizable - Developers can write Cardinal plugins to introduce new features such as your own user scripting language, zero-knowledge proof systems, and more.
  • Tick-driven runtime - Cardinal utilizes the concept of ticks, commonly used in game server architecture, to allow developers to implement complex real-time game logic such as game physics, combat systems, and many more that are difficult to implement in an event-driven runtime of a typical blockchain.
  • Easy integration with game engines - Cardinal provides a simple, easy-to-use API and client libraries for game developers to integrate their game with popular game engines such as Unity and Unreal Engine.
  • Entity Component System - Cardinal comes with native ECS architecture that allows game developers to easily manage and extend their game state and logic.
Introduction to ECS