Web3 gaming studio ATMTA (Automata), Inc. has announced that they have officially open sourced the Star Frame framework used in developing Star Atlas, giving back to the Solana community as a token of gratitude for their early support.

“Building the largest space MMO crypto game has forced us at Star Atlas to solve challenges few teams encounter. Out of that journey came Star Frame, a framework born from necessity. Today, we’re open-sourcing it to give every Solana developer the tools to overcome the technical limitations that hold back complex program development.”

What Is Star Frame?

Star Frame is a new modular framework designed for writing complex, scalable and secure programs on Solana, breaking the technical barriers that have previously made it difficult to create sophisticated applications on the high-performance blockchain network.

The new framework delivers a flexible, trait-based architecture with dynamic account support and Account Set lifecycle to make it easier to build better apps. Developers are said to enjoy “unmatched flexibility, performance, and safety for building complex programs” while using this framework. Whether you want to build a web3 game or a different kind of web3 app, this framework is compatible with any kind of use case thanks to its use of Rust’s trait system, which comes with a customizable toolbox of components that can be adapted to suit the project’s needs, allowing developers to overcome current obstacles “while fully harnessing Solana’s high-performance runtime.”

The team behind one of the most well-known sci-fi gaming projects has built this framework on 3 core principles: modularity, performance, and safety.

Modularity is achieved thanks to using a trait-based design with practical default implementations to give builders the freedom to add in and reimplement components as they see fit. This flexibility makes the framework suitable for a wide variety of different blockchain projects. When it comes to performance, the framework keeps compute overhead low thanks to its near-zero cost abstractions and zero-copy data structures, giving developers room to allocate more resources to their own work. As for safety, the framework uses compile-time validation to lower runtime errors in order to improve security for “mission-critical logic” while “tightening the development loop” to enable faster program iteration and development.

What Are the Key Features of Star Frame? 

The key features of Star Frame include the following 3 components:

  • Unsized Type System
  • Account Set Lifecycle
  • Trait-based Architecture

The Unsized Type System is a set of rules that uses dynamic, zero-copy data structures such as resizable lists, sets, and maps to enable devs to create apps that can run with “near raw-memory efficiency.” If you want to build complex order books in DeFi or large player inventories for your web3 games, this system makes it possible to do all that with minimal overhead.

Account Set Lifecycle consists of a built-in 3-stage process (Decode, Validate, Cleanup) which eliminates guesswork in account validation to deliver security, reliability, and correctness by taking care of critical info that is generally overlooked to give developers "confidence that their programs are secure by design.”

Trait-based Abstraction makes it possible for Star Frame to offer a flexible toolbox of reusable behaviors for developers to use and extend to fit their project, making it possible to innovate at a faster rate without it being at the cost of performance or security.

“Solana has supported us from the very beginning, and Star Atlas wouldn’t be what it is today without that foundation. Open-sourcing Star Frame is our way of giving back so other developers on Solana can go further, faster.”

The team reimplemented Anchor’s bench program into the trait-based program framework to run benchmarks and see how it actually performs. The results showed that Star Frame successfully builds on Anchor by providing added freedom and flexibility for complex programs while reporting significant reductions in compute unit and binary size, according to benchmark images in the official Medium announcement post.

Where Can You Find Star Frame?

As is usually the case with open source projects, the source code for Star Frame can be found on GitHub. It’s also available on Rust package registry crates.io,  and a build page can be found on Star Atlas’s website with the same links. Check out the Medium post linked in the X announcement below, as well as the official documentation, to learn more.

About Star Atlas

Star Atlas is a sci-fi MMO, grand strategy game and blockchain gaming ecosystem powered by Solana and Unreal Engine 5. This space metaverse aims to deliver a galactic player-driven economy across a fully decentralized universe in which players can play and own their experience and assets.

Players in Star Atlas can own, craft, and trade assets through NFTs like starships, crew, and land, while competing or cooperating in a living space economy where governance plays an important part in shaping the direction of the metaverse.

The flagship third-person game is available for download on the Epic Games Store, but requires getting a game key from the official Discord server to gain access. This web3 MMO is also continuously being developed into separate modules, which you can currently play as browser-based strategy games: SAGE Labs and Holosim.

Both SAGE Labs and Holosim are online space strategy games in which players side with one of 3 different factions and compete to deliver Faction Infrastructure Contracts (FICs) to Starbases on their faction’s territory. Players need to acquire different resources to craft FICs at Starbases. Each faction features their own exclusive resources, missions, and specialized ships while allowing players to play and earn $ATLAS in SAGE Labs in a simple way.

Holosim is the free to play version of on-chain SAGE Labs that you can try out without needing to connect a crypto wallet. Those who want to earn rewards should connect their Solana wallet however in order to properly play to earn in Holosim Season 1, Chapter 1, now live from August 20 to September 24 with $35k in seasonal prizes.

This month, ATMTA announced Zink SVM Layer 1 during Star Atlas Summer.