How CodeCombat Was Built | Hacker News Reader

How CodeCombat Was Built

blog.leanstack.io

64 pointsyonasb6 comments

I love codecombat. I love how these guys started out like me with hardly any understanding of what different frameworks do. And yet, they went and make something so amazing.

Just a little nitpick: Does anybody else find the redundant "like" annoying? It doesn't matter as much when you're talking but it makes reading it, rather annoying. Perhaps the editors should have refined that

What are they using Firebase for?

Great read anyway. I always feel inferior when I see other companies' tech stacks but this makes me realize you can learn along the way and still be successful.

>"Nick: It wasn’t quite working, like people would start typing and we’d notice, they’d start typing one character and all of a sudden eight characters appear, it’s all crazy.

Scott: It’s a really complicated algorithm.

Nick: Yeah. Eventually, we could’ve waited for ShareJS to update to the newer version or we could just go to Firebase and put in an adaptor for that and it’s been totally stable since we did that. So we started using Firebase a couple of months ago."

So from that i infer that they were somehow using it to implement the Multiplayer mode. I still haven't entirely understood how firebase is a client-side DB so i am not sure how they were doing that

Mostly Firepad, which is an adapter for CodeMirror that uses Firebase to add real-time collaborative text editing to it: http://www.firepad.io/

We are using ACE, not CodeMirror, so I added another adapter to hook Firepad up to ACE: http://ace.c9.io/

We also use Firebase to sync the wizard presence, position, chat, and game script state.

It's a nice problem we have that there are several programming games out there that I keep confusing them...my first thought was that CodeCombat was the $170K Kickstarter that ran into some drama last year...but that is Code Hero. Does anyone know how it's doing? This is the latest update I've found:

http://www.joystiq.com/2013/08/15/code-hero-one-year-later-m...

Its Twitter account hasn't updated since 2012.

They recently resumed updates: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/primerist/code-hero-a-g...

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