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Comment by gafferongames | Hacker News Reader

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Hey, can you please make your substantive points without shallow dismissals or snark? This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Unfortunately you posted a few comments in this thread that have crossed that line.

If you know more than others as a professional multiplayer game developer, that's great, but in that case the thing to do is to share some of what you know, so others can learn. If you don't want to do that, that's fine, but in that case please don't post. Putdowns and swipes only degrade the discussion.

Excuse me Tom, please stop with ad hominem and attack the topic not the poster.

Tom I'm afraid you're misreading the tone of my posts and their character.

I could post anything objectively true in this thread like "the sky is blue", and some idiot will post a one sentence response that in fact it's not. This idiot likes to be the last person getting snark in responding to a completely reasonable statement of fact or opinion by an expert in the space.

What I do differently is that yes, I do reply to the snark with a rebuttal. Is this rebuttal snarky? Potentially, but is it earned? Definitely.

You're moderator so let me speak to you that way. If you don't let people rebut bullshit in this comment section, you'll just end up with a bunch of uninformed discourse, where the final word is made by some idiot, who doesn't even make multiplayer games and everyone ends up thinking the sky is fucking green. This has real world consequence when future game developers try to build games on poorly made technology, which ruins game studios and people's lives.

Then again, it's hacker news, and what do a bunch of wannabe startup guys know about making games in the first place. Unskilled and unaware of it. Moderate away sir!

You can "rebut bullshit" without being aggressive or nasty. If someone else is wrong, it's enough to provide correct information respectfully. Putting others down, or slamming their work in a hostile way, doesn't help and degrades this community badly.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Btw, it's quite common for commenters to underestimate the provocation in their own posts and overestimate the provocation in other people's posts. Those two factors can multiply into quite a skew in perception (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). I wonder whether this might be a bit of a factor here, if you really don't see how aggressively your comments were coming across.

In my experience providing detailed information in a response in the comment section on this particular topic (game development and networking) in hacker news comments simply creates more surface area for nitpicking and arguing in response, so I keep to short responses and rebuttals.

In the future, I don't feel that writing anything more here on this topic is a worthwhile use of my time.

But I don’t understand. Why not both? You can have a short answer and rebuttal and still be kind and nonaggressive.

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Yes yes, everybody should be the Dalai Lama. But I'm not.

You're just being asked not to be a jerk to people on a messageboard. It's the same thing being asked of everyone else so that we can have a decent messageboard and it's not difficult.

Just want to chime in that although this comment is a bit harsh, it does hold a lot of truth. As a game netcode engineer, most of my time is spent on latency hiding techniques and its consequences (for example, we use rollback netcode and lots of efforts are spent on minimizing visual/sound glitches when mispredict, rollback and reconcile). There are lots of middleware that help with this (eg. Photon, SnapNet, etc) but in general there's no silver bullet - it's highly gameplay specific. Even for the same game, the solution can vary depending on different trade-offs (i.e. budget, correctness/anticheat).

As to how to store the game state in memory, it's usually not something that needs much thinking: it's simply done the same way (or similar) as the game's client code. After all, netcode is mostly about efficient state replication and this saves CPU time when replicating it across clients - and gives more CPU time for minimizing bandwidth (like delta encoding, quantization, etc). If you want, you can utilize some techniques like ECS to optimize for CPU cache locality, but it affect gameplay code a lot and would need to get the whole team onboard.

Also, I just noticed the username "gafferongames" - Glenn's blog[1] has been a must-read for netcode engineers. It helped me a lot when I started working on netcode in the 2010s

[1] https://gafferongames.com/

Well, I'm not a professional gamedev, nor did I ever do much multiplayer code, but:

1) AFAIR, the ECS patterns family[0] originally came from MMORPG world, and boiled down to designing your game state to work well with relational databases;

2) Around 6 years ago, while toying with yet another (see [0]) take on ECS for a simple game, and wondering how to query stuff efficiently, it dawned on me that the code I'm writing is basically implementing spacial indices and other such concepts from relational DB world. At that point, I thought to myself, "why continue wasting time Greenspunning[1] a database for the internal state, when I could use a real one?", and followed by "you know what I really need next? An in-memory SQLite database to store all my runtime game state!".

I didn't get very far with my experiment due to constraints of adult life, but I did prove that I can build a basic Roguelike skeleton (2D tile map, entities, walls, collisions) while storing all state in SQLite, and have it run at 60 FPS with half of the frame time to spare for other things, on moderately powerful machine (as of 6 years ago), all without too much optimization (Common Lisp with FFI bindings to libsqlite3 + a simple RLU cache in front of queries).

So it's not at all a stupid idea, IMO :). I would test it further if I had the time.

[0] - The term means different things to different people. I've seen at least three distinct gamedev design patterns claiming the name ECS for themselves, all conceptually incompatible with each other. More, if you also consider "whatever Unity/Unreal/Godot/... calls ECS".

We can and plan to handle the complex lag masking netcode as well. We've just focused so far on games that don't need very sophisticated lag compensation

Planning to support complex lag masking netcode as a TODO is not a good sign.

Seems too biased and harsh. The best lag masking and clientside prediction systems I've experienced as a player are those that are closely integrated with the idiosyncratic gameplay mechanics. I would never expect SpacetimeDB to have a one-size-fits-all solution to this, nor for it to be the central focus of their product.

Game development is not something you learn by playing games.

You will implement terrible lag masking and clientside prediction if you aren't looking at it from the UX perspective, because that is literally the only reason these features exist, to trick players into thinking the game signals are moving faster and with greater frequency through the network than is physically possible. Perhaps you would make better games if you considered the user perspective.

TODO does not imply no plan or that we haven't thought deeply about the problem. Prioritization is imperative when you're building an MMORPG and a new database with a small team for both.

How can you think deeply and plan for something when you don't know what don't know. You can only really understand these things when you've taken a game using these latency hiding techniques into production, and then after this, you'll probably realize that some of your original ideas were wrong. Where does this leave SpacetimeDB then?

just because someone doesn't think and plan just like you do, doesn't mean they will not succeed

I'd be happy to schedule a chat to talk with you about our plans if you'd like! I'd love to get your thoughts.

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Ah you mean like implementing UDP and supporting complex lag masking netcode before we have to?

If a game has no players, does it really matter if it's networked with UDP or TCP?

I mean, they are dogfooding their own database. If they’re making a MMO game with it presumably the game has latency masking netcode, even if it isn’t in part of the database.

As a gamedev, I don't understand the use-case for SpacetimeDB.

Is it simply to be able to persist the game state?

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