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SpacetimeDB

spacetimedb.com

21–30 of 205 posts

Re: SpacetimeDB

#21
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.

Same! The algorithm thinks I needed to watch this.

Re: SpacetimeDB

#23
post #4

This looks really interesting, and bitcraft looks cute. I did hit a personal bias: when I saw "maincloud" as a phrase to do with pricing my heart sank because my brain went "they've wedged in some crypto shit!". Turns out no, it's just a naming thing for hosting credits.

I feel like they've been inspired by crypto for the way they handle billing. They sell you "Energy" which you use by running on their infra. Seems like a needless abstraction to me.

Re: SpacetimeDB

#24
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Would you seriously consider using any technology built by people who are making their first game?

Re: SpacetimeDB

#25
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.

Same! The algorithm thinks I needed to watch this.

This guy often comes here from HN, give him some Rust, Elixir, why JavaScript framework of the day sucks, and this SpacetimeDB thing!

Re: SpacetimeDB

#26
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.

As a game dev I don't really see what problems this solves. Most of the work you would have in games is related to simulation - something this doesn't help you with at all. It can actually make simulation more difficult because all your state would be decoupled from a game engine (which is built for simulation). So you'd end up having game servers running the simulation syncing to SpacetimeDB... or of course you try to build the simulation inside SpacetimeDB with no help from it.

Re: SpacetimeDB

#27
post #23
post #4

This looks really interesting, and bitcraft looks cute. I did hit a personal bias: when I saw "maincloud" as a phrase to do with pricing my heart sank because my brain went "they've wedged in some crypto shit!". Turns out no, it's just a naming thing for hosting credits.

I feel like they've been inspired by crypto for the way they handle billing. They sell you "Energy" which you use by running on their infra. Seems like a needless abstraction to me.

Doesn't Snowflake do something similar though?

Re: SpacetimeDB

#28
SpacetimeDB fits into a genre of tech that I want to call "universe brain reorgs" - structural re-arrangements that might unlock wild performance increases. The challenge with these is that they require devs to re-align their thinking and it's hard to disentangle if "the problem" is that the technology isn't being fully embraced or if the promises of the tech don't work for your use case.

Other techs in this category have seen a lot of success. I'd classify Elixir and Node as being similar in that you adopt a stack to get access to some rare guarantees and also accept new or exotic limits.

I think these things tend to rely on having clear-eyed visionaries out in front, able to show off their strengths in open source. Without a successful project it's hard to believe the claims. I hope clockwork labs is able to deliver their example game (it seems high risk because, even if the game is a technical wonder - what if it isn't fun?!).

Re: SpacetimeDB

#29

    #[table(name = person, public)]
    pub struct Person {
        name: String,
    }
No, just say no. Do not conflate your relational database schema with however you treat that data in your app. You want explicit control, not annotation magic.

Re: SpacetimeDB

#30

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…

Just to copy in my response from there too:

I'm Tyler (guy in the video). In BitCraft we currently implement client-side prediction outside of SpacetimeDB.

However, we DO plan to add automatic client-side prediction as a feature for SpacetimeDB in the near-ish future! Because all your server-side logic is in Wasm modules, we plan to run an embedded version of SpacetimeDB to execute the server logic on the client. As long as the server and client agree on the changes to the data we can reconcile the transactions, otherwise we'll rollback. Notably, we can do this with only partial state on the client!

We can also do deterministic simulation if you have total knowledge of the game state with this solution as well.

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