SpacetimeDB

SpacetimeDB fits into a genre of tech that I want to call &quot;universe brain reorgs&quot; - 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&#x27;s hard to disentangle if &quot;the problem&quot; is that the technology isn&#x27;t being fully embraced or if the promises of the tech don&#x27;t work for your use case.<p>Other techs in this category have seen a lot of success. I&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;t fun?!).

&gt; SpacetimeDB wasn&#x27;t built in a vacuum. It&#x27;s the system powers our own large-scale MMORPG BitCraft. We designed it specifically for the performance requirements of games. That means extremely low latency (~100 us&#x2F;Tx) and extremely high throughput (~1,000,000 Tx&#x2F;s).<p>If you are trying to build a new MMO that scales to the moon, you might want to take a look at how the existing market goes about things.<p>Take World of Warcraft for example. You could probably put a $20 MySQL VPS behind a realm and have it reliably persist state with how authoritative and infrequently updated the clients are.<p>Being clever with what you can trust the client with and how the server reconciles events is where I think you will find most of the scaling hacks.

I don&#x27;t really understand how you would write a game server using this tech. Lets say you need to simulate physics, pathfinding, animation etc on server. How one would integrate all of this? In regular world you just use unreal&#x2F;unity headless mode that includes all of this but using spacetimedb requires ditching the game engine and reimplementing everything from scratch?

This looks really interesting, and bitcraft looks cute.<p>I did hit a personal bias: when I saw &quot;maincloud&quot; as a phrase to do with pricing my heart sank because my brain went &quot;they&#x27;ve wedged in some crypto shit!&quot;. Turns out no, it&#x27;s just a naming thing for hosting credits.

This is indeed interesting, but FYI this is a BSL-covered project with somewhat onerous times: only one instance per service (i.e. don&#x27;t scale out, if I understand correctly) [0].<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ClockworkLabs&#x2F;SpacetimeDB?tab=License-1-ov-file#readme">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ClockworkLabs&#x2F;SpacetimeDB?tab=License-1-o...</a>

YouTube keeps recommending SpacetimeDB to me even though I have never made a videogame. Now I&#x27;m seeing it on HN too.<p>Are there any game devs here who can comment on how useful this actually is? The pitch seems pretty cool but I can&#x27;t tell how much of it is just good marketing.

This looks to be an in memory db, with a wasm runtime to host domain logic. The hand wavy part was how do they handle scale and clustering? Are we sharding the data our selves (atm it seems so.).<p>This is nice and all but the hard part is replication and consistency in a distributed database. In memory has its uses, also disk backed tables can have their uses. Pretty much normal databases already do this, just writing domain logic in stored procs is kind of annoying.<p>I&#x27;d imagine embedding sqlite in your binary using memory tables is equivalent at the moment. Well you&#x27;d have to write code to publish table updates to clients. I suppose it has that going for it.<p>I&#x27;ve seen some hand wavy docs about clustering but nothing concrete.

<p><pre><code> #[table(name = person, public)] pub struct Person { name: String, } </code></pre> 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.

A relational DB + serverless compute + suspiciously fast updates

Is there a place where I can read about what technologies online games use? As a terminal gamer I am ashamed to say I have no idea what goes on behind the scenes.

Previous Discussions<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43593913">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43593913</a>

Does this make any sense in single-player games, where the db would run locally on the user&#x27;s machine? Does it have any benefit to run all game state through a local db?<p>I&#x27;m not a game dev, but I&#x27;m imagining that if I&#x27;d write a custom game engine, I&#x27;d have to write just the &quot;frontend&quot; aka. graphics engine if I&#x27;d have a robust state manager (+tooling) as a separate piece of software.

Discussion last week: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43593913">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43593913</a>

$0.28&#x2F;gb for net traffic on the Maincloud is pretty brutal.

YouTube suggested the video on this. It seems pretty interesting, but I&#x27;m curious how well it works in the real world.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=kzDnA_EVhTU&amp;t=753s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=kzDnA_EVhTU&amp;t=753s</a>

This feels like very old-school java client&#x2F;server architectures.<p>&gt;This means that you can write your entire application in a single language and deploy it as a single binary. No more microservices, no more containers, no more Kubernetes, no more Docker, no more VMs, no more DevOps, no more infrastructure, no more ops, no more servers.<p>This is an abstraction layer that will end up being applied on top of most or all of those technologies. You can&#x27;t hide from the fact that the database instances need to run on something.

Its areally great effort, but i would stick with PostgreSQL with PL&#x2F;SQL procedure and tons of extensions.<p>Lowering down the TRSACTION LEVEL, Async transctions on disk backed tables and UNLOGGED Tables can help you go a long way.<p>Also, in next major version (v18) of PG, they are trying to implment io_uring support which will further drastically improve the random read&#x2F;write performance.

Interesting, been tinkering on a similar project of my own. Main similarity is also combining database&#x2F;server-simulation even if it seems like some parts of the design might differ. Gonna take a deeper look when I get home later.

I found the idea of polling DB queries interesting. They basically took what is done with HTTP and pushed it down the stack directly in the DB server, eliminating the extra SQL round trips one needs to make server-side in order to provide updates. Neat!

&gt;SpacetimeDB wasn&#x27;t built in a vacuum. It&#x27;s the system powers our own large-scale MMORPG BitCraft.<p>I checked out BitCraft and it&#x27;s not released yet. Don&#x27;t know if I&#x27;m being unfair here, but isn&#x27;t this a bit misleading?

I wish you success! And hopefully you don&#x27;t end up disappearing like SpatialOS. They tried very hard promoting its capacity for large scale MMO, even published a game (Scavenger IIRC?) made with it.

The “server in DB” is also the Convex model, but Convex is more tailored towards JS full stack apps:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.convex.dev&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.convex.dev&#x2F;</a>

A server DB monolith that explicitly doesn&#x27;t scale? You put some of your game logic on the server and some on the client with no clear dividing line? When PoE2 uses PostGres and Eve Online uses SQLServer? Also doesn&#x27;t tackle the main challenges of online multi-player games (physics sim rollback)?<p>I&#x27;m sorry but there might not be a good market for this.

Is it similar to rethinkdb, I remember using RethinkDB for similar use case for live queries running directly on database layer back in 2016.

The website and naming (and product space, sorta) remind me a lot of Parallel Universe. Any direct inspiration there, or shared personnel?

Is this similar to the way HeroEngine works? IIR, that was basically a big database server (that wasn&#x27;t compatible with anything else).

How do you integrate this with unreal engine 5.5

i&#x27;ve tried it, it works, it&#x27;s nice :) got a mini mmo running with several people at once running around

Very cool, keep it up. Always good to see innovations, creativity and curiosity in the database space.

Minor critique - the logo is almost exactly the same as Grok&#x27;s

Seems like a neat idea, but for the love of Jesus Christ offer me a flat rate billing solution. Or at least an option of doing that. This seems like the type of thing that will accidentally burn through all of your credits if you code something wrong, and then you&#x27;re going to have to beg their tech support to refund you.<p>I had an idea last night for an RTS like game where the units can only be controlled via radio commands which are only sent every minute or so, but this feels like a very strange way to do it. Not to mention hey it&#x27;s not open source, but after 4 years will open source everything ?<p>Why, why wouldn&#x27;t I just want to pay render or something $7 a month for a normal server versus this ? And use an actual open source stack.

am i the only one who hoped (and thought from the logo) that this was by the Spaceteam devs?

Best comment from last time this got posted:<p>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&#x27;t get me wrong, this looks very nice. It looks like a solid building block for persistent worlds in multiplayer games. You&#x27;ll just have to do your lag masking netcode yourself.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43593913">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43593913</a>