that matches what i'm seeing - people want both. fast feedback loops in the first hour and stuff that still pulls them back three weeks later. hardest part is making the slow stuff feel like it matters before they've invested the time. still figuring it out with a lot of nice feedback from the community.
Very cool, though wouldn't using durable objects for a MMO type game become prohibitively expensive vs using websockets with a stateful server? I assume your game is not sending that many requests so its not too bad.
good question. it's not real-time - actions resolve over hours.... request rate per active player is single digits per minute, often zero. DO alarms handle the time-based stuff (fleet arrivals, combat resolution, resource ticks) so there's no persistent connection cost. so far costs have been negligible
compared to running an always-on origin.
websockets + stateful server would be the right call for anything realtime. for tick-based strategy with hour-long timers, DOs feel like the cleanest fit - i get per-island isolation, alarms, and storage in one primitive without managing a connection pool.
yeah, for the game tick i went the other way though. alarms fire on schedule, resources calculated on-read from timestamps. a player can close the tab for 8 hours and the world still moves correctly when they come back, without holding any per-session state.
Fair enough, I didn't mean to criticize your work in any way, or even buy into a criticism of it. I was really just pointing out to GP that their "or" was actually an "and".
no worries at all, didn't read it as criticism. fair correction too, DOs do both, i just leaned alarms-first for this use case. appreciate you keeping the thread accurate.
funny side note: this started as me nerding around with Cloudflare's stack on vacation, just seeing what was possible. been a 1.1.1.1 WARP fanboy from day one. didn't intend to ship a game. showed an early version to a few friends and they just... kept playing. didn't say much, just kept logging in. that's when it hit me that other people might want this too. so here we are. hope you like it.
Oh no, I remember those browser games, I will stay well away from them because they're the kind of thing that I will play for a month straight otherwise.
it's designed for once-a-day check-ins though, not minute-by-minute refreshing. buildings are fast in the beginning and take real time later to upgrade. more like working in a garden than playing a game. easier to walk away from than you'd think.
nice. honestly the test isn't the first session - it's the 5 minutes tomorrow morning when you check what happened overnight. that's where the genre lives. some alliances are already prepping excel templates and mapping the ocean grid systematically. didn't expect that this fast (or at all). :)
websockets + stateful server would be the right call for anything realtime. for tick-based strategy with hour-long timers, DOs feel like the cleanest fit - i get per-island isolation, alarms, and storage in one primitive without managing a connection pool.
it's designed for once-a-day check-ins though, not minute-by-minute refreshing. buildings are fast in the beginning and take real time later to upgrade. more like working in a garden than playing a game. easier to walk away from than you'd think.