€10/m/location is damn impressive. I've run servers for a turn-based asynchronous and real-time casual game for the past three years. With ~700k unique monthly players (about 200k/day) we do about 1500 request/s at peak and pay thousands a month for our AWS stack. I'm not mad at it, I think we get great utility for what we pay, but this is lean and mean for realz.<p>Kudos!
The author writes:
"Reduce the number of syscalls by caching the value of gettimeofday() until a new tick happens or network packet comes in"
But I'm pretty sure glibc on recent Linux handles gettimeofday in user-space, without context switch (kernel maps the data to userspace). I guess caching the value locally and updating it 1/sec or something would still help if there are thousands of calls/sec, but not as much as if it was really a syscall.
Awesome and inspiring to me, great work!<p>I am now looking at LFE (Lisp Flavored Erlang) and ELM to create a very small online game. It makes me want to maintain C/C++ chops.<p>It's sad Apple is so walled in that you need a VM to build for OS X, and iOS doesn't even make the list. I have an iPad, but I use an Android phone for that reason, and I only program mobile for Android. Apple is getting better at supporting iOS devs of late though...
I just re-downloaded (vanilla) teeworlds the other day. After playing a lot of QW and Xonotic, it's nice to play something like HLDM or TeeWorlds that's a bit more wacky and less competitive. There is no bunnyhopping in teeworlds. Just cute fluffballs, hookshots, and heavy weaponry. Although, for whatever reason, all of the players are in the EU, or SA, and I'm USEast, so the ping's really high. One of many reasons I want to get a GPU that can handle UT4. Yes, mine is really that bad.