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SpacetimeDB

spacetimedb.com

11–20 of 205 posts

Re: SpacetimeDB

#11
post #9

YouTube keeps recommending SpacetimeDB to me even though I have never made a videogame. Now I'm seeing it on HN too. Are there any game devs here who can comment on how useful this actually is? The pitch seems pretty cool but I can't tell how much of it is just good marketing.

Not a developer affiliated with the project. But here's my take:

The problem is that the proof is in the pudding. Some of their claims feel outlandish. Imagine writing your game with SQL queries. Rather than crafting update packets that only contain relevant game info you just do `select * from players where abs(player.x - current_player.x) + abs(player.y - current_player.y) + abs(player.z - current_player.z) Running physics sim in SQL stored functions sounds insane but that's exactly what they're advertising. They say it's due to in-mem DB optimization but I'm not sure how they horizontally scale that (they allow you to run standalone but any scaling requires their cloud product)

Re: SpacetimeDB

#12
post #5

Is there a place where I can read about what technologies online games use? As a terminal gamer I am ashamed to say I have no idea what goes on behind the scenes.

Assuming you're referring to the backend side of things for online/multiplayer games, working through the Hathora tutorials in the docs can be a good first introduction to general idioms related to backend systems architecture: https://docs.hathora.dev/#/builder/

From my past consulting experience though, the distributed systems side of games is all over the place. Designs tend to need to be customized for each games needs, which usually directly influences which technologies are chosen.

Re: SpacetimeDB

#13
post #9

YouTube keeps recommending SpacetimeDB to me even though I have never made a videogame. Now I'm seeing it on HN too. Are there any game devs here who can comment on how useful this actually is? The pitch seems pretty cool but I can't tell how much of it is just good marketing.

It's a cool technology, but the hard thing about building an MMO is architecture, not just making the server faster / wider. If you want a good overview of the types of problems to be solved in scaling an MMO, check out https://youtu.be/-c4t3Y5l5jY.

There is a pretty big underlap between these problems, and the ones solved by SpacetimeDB. So much so that if you built a system using both SpacetimeDB and another, high-level tool to manage chunking, transitioning, server provisioning etc. it would obviously be the latter system that was more indispensable to scaling your MMO.

Re: SpacetimeDB

#15
post #9

YouTube keeps recommending SpacetimeDB to me even though I have never made a videogame. Now I'm seeing it on HN too. Are there any game devs here who can comment on how useful this actually is? The pitch seems pretty cool but I can't tell how much of it is just good marketing.

Professional multiplayer game developer here. I wonder what multiplayer games the SpacetimeDB folks have actually shipped?

Re: SpacetimeDB

#16

Best comment from last time this got posted: I kept on reading expecting to see motion prediction, multiversion, or similar given the name and focus on games, but no. This is a totally normal database, designed for low latency and with support for WASM stored procedures. You can host your own server or they will rent you one. Don't get me wrong, this looks very nice. It looks like a solid building block for persisten…

Wasm? What a great idea.

Re: SpacetimeDB

#17

Best comment from last time this got posted: I kept on reading expecting to see motion prediction, multiversion, or similar given the name and focus on games, but no. This is a totally normal database, designed for low latency and with support for WASM stored procedures. You can host your own server or they will rent you one. Don't get me wrong, this looks very nice. It looks like a solid building block for persisten…

[flagged]

Re: SpacetimeDB

#19
post #9

YouTube keeps recommending SpacetimeDB to me even though I have never made a videogame. Now I'm seeing it on HN too. Are there any game devs here who can comment on how useful this actually is? The pitch seems pretty cool but I can't tell how much of it is just good marketing.

Professional multiplayer game developer here. I wonder what multiplayer games the SpacetimeDB folks have actually shipped?

This is theirs https://bitcraftonline.com/ - not "released" yet but they have alpha testers on it apparently.
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