Schemaverse, a space based strategy game to learn PostgreSQL | Hacker News Reader

Schemaverse, a space based strategy game to learn PostgreSQL

schemaverse.com

288 pointsxupybd24 comments

Heh, ok did not expect to see my old project sitting on the front page <3 The server is getting gently hugged to death atm but I'll try to keep it responding.

Some added info...

- The entire thing is open source: https://github.com/Abstrct/Schemaverse/

- This was discussed on hacker news 10(!) years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3969108

- Some players have written more code to play the game than I wrote to build it

- We have a tournament every year at DEF CON

- Postgres is awesome

> - We have a tournament every year at DEF CON

The same guy pretty much wins every year with minor modifications to his code (okay, except the last two years with the whole covid thing). That said, he's an extremely cool guy and very eager to train his potential competition. Please please please take him up on the offer.

I suggest to anyone to show up to the Defcon Is Cancelled party that he co-organizes.

Yeah, he's pretty unstoppable lately but there have been a couple new players starting to improve a lot too.

I'll happily share his secret. He recognized that it's not about any single metric, it's all about optimizing for the trophies https://github.com/Abstrct/Schemaverse/tree/master/trophies

Heads up, you're still pointing to Freenode for the IRC channel. Possibly you'd want to change that to point at Libera.Chat. The channel already exists at the latter.

Thanks! Totally forgot to update that. You can find us in #schemaverse on Libera.Chat

Thanks for creating this it helped me improve my Postgresql and SQL 8 years ago.

That's awesome! I'm glad to hear it helped. I was personally so sick of every database course I took using the same `department` and `employee` tables, I wanted something fun instead.

Great idea and fyi the how to play link in the game points to a wrong url in your github wiki.

Those should be fixed now. Thanks!

Such a cool game. It has been responsible for security fixes that improved Postgres itself.

The coolest part is the SQL Injection trophy.

There are paths to get many trophies in this game (most ships killed in a round, most resources mined in a round, most planets conquered, etc.). Those are all granted automatically.

But there is NO automated path to grant a SQL Injection trophy.

...yet some people have them. Hah.

Hah. From the tutorial's "Winning" page:

> This is an easy trophy. All you need to do is award it to yourself

This is genius! So te get the award on SQL Injection you just need to SQL Inject?

No bad judgement, small servers are limited and you won’t want huge bill. But there’s some irony in it being down from load.

Heh, funny you say that. Schemaverse was built for my masters thesis which explored if the application layer and data layer could be successfully merged in a way that improved data consistency and integrity, and thus arguably improved security. I'll save you the 90 page read but short answer yes, but scaling becomes an absolute nightmare.

That looks like a project for next weekend to me... By which time some of this excitement may drop down, it's a shame if folk don't come back to it just because of overload on an unexpectant server!

Anyway, thanks for the work you did on this abstrct you have made a community manager very happy :)

You're welcome! Feel free to drop by #Schemaverse on Libera.Chat if you have any questions.

I’d love to see way more of this kind of stuff. It’s such a great way to learn.

One of the players dockerized it all too https://github.com/frozenfoxx/docker-schemaverse

I highly recommend running your own instance for battles between classmates or employees.

Am I the only one who hurriedly read this as "schmetaverse", as in "bah, metaverse, schmetaverse ..." (sorry if off-topic)

Clicked "How to play", got this:

" Whoa there!

You have sent an invalid request.

Please do not send this request again. "

Not the best incentive to start playing

The very tiny server is getting a bit crushed at the moment. If you actually want to try it out, check the tutorial tomorrow when the traffic goes back to normal.

https://schemaverse.com/tutorial/tutorial.php

I encountered the same error message, yet it seemed to be from a broken link instead. From the homepage [0] while signed in, I clicked on "How to play" right under the query entry box. It sent me to this page, which is a different url from the one you linked: https://wiki.github.com/Abstrct/Schemaverse/how-to-play

0: https://schemaverse.com/tw/index.php

Ah, it does look like GitHub changed their wiki url scheme. Thanks for the info!

That should link directly to the tutorial (link above) instead of that wiki anyways

That's just a side-quest surely. ;o)

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