Building a DOOM-like multiplayer shooter in pure SQL

124•lvogel•8h ago

Comments

esafak•6h ago

This is a clever ad! I had not heard of them so I looked up the technology behind it: https://cedardb.com/docs/technology/

A Postgresql-compatible HTAP. It appears to be single server and closed source. Roadmap: https://cedardb.com/docs/roadmap/

zekrioca•2h ago

Would this multiplayer work on Postgresql?

ChrisWint•32m ago

Depends on what you mean by "works" I guess. The statements all look like PostgreSQL SQL and should, therefore, all work. That said, they are pretty heavy duty, especially the recursive Ray tracing, so I expect it to lag quite a bit.

FridgeSeal•59m ago

IIUC its a commercialisation of a research DB called Umbra which has some pretty amazing performance characteristics.

a3w•5h ago

THIS IS MADNESS.

Krieger, is that you? You went too far with it.

I am all for catgirl holograms, so good science by Archer's Krieger on that. But SQL should not run Doom. The limits of science have been pushed beyond madness!

Well okay, "does it run Doom" comes up here frequently.

But why not solve "does it run catgirls" first, if you are a real-life mad scientist?

lvogel•5h ago

If you want to take a look at the source code, here's the repo! https://github.com/cedardb/DOOMQL

halifaxbeard•1h ago

unironically, this is such an elegant way to express ray marching

https://github.com/cedardb/DOOMQL/blob/f14b5ef9ef0b23045376b...

valorzard•4h ago

Feel like the logical extreme of this is a database built for multiplayer games, something like: https://github.com/clockworklabs/SpacetimeDB

Though there, you are still writing the main game logic in Rust or C#

crooked-v•3h ago

"Just build all the logic directly in the DB" is something I've thought about before for simple multiplayer online RPGs and the like, where quite a lot of things are effectively just a direct mapping from database to screen. But, using the general idea for 'twitch' gaming is really wild.

lvogel•2h ago

Yea, I actually thought of the viability of SQL for games while working on DOOMQL. It's just so easy to express a lot of game logic in SQL queries. As an avid OSRS player I was thinking about doing a simple MUD/MMO next.

Thanks for the pointer to SpacetimeDB - haven't heard of it before!

all2•18m ago

My understanding is that Spacetime db embeds the "system" component of an ECS into a DB. The rest of the ECS is in there too.

I briefly looked into it, but never got past that fundamental piece.

pjot•4h ago

Author of the mentioned DuckDB-DOOM here!

This is awesome - multiplayer is a great addition. Really like the cone in the mini-map too

IncRnd•3h ago

This is pretty neat. I was expecting a WAD file to get loaded, but this was still pretty neat, even better than Windows XP in JS.

selimthegrim•3h ago

The post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43761998

lvogel•2h ago

Love that you liked it! Your project was the inspiration and showed me the insanity was actually feasible :D

ant6n•4h ago

It’s a very cool accomplishment. As a nerd of early shooters, I do wonder whether it’s fair to call it Doom-like. It’s clearly more untextured Wolfenstein 3d.

Are we sufficiently far from 1993 to just “round” it all to being Doom-like? certainly it’s better for eyeballs.

johnisgood•3h ago

Yeah, it is definitely Wolfenstein 3D in my opinion. Many Doom-clones are. Maybe Wolfenstein 3D is a Doom-clone in itself? I dunno, I do not know the history. Can anyone enlighten me?

nemomarx•2h ago

Wolfenstein came first, Doom followed from the same team. While some doom clones at the time continued to use the Wolfenstein engine it was fairly brief. Rise of the triad is I think the most impressive one using basically the Wolfenstein model?

jandrese•2h ago

Depends where you want to draw the line. You could trace the lineage all the way back to Rogue with its grid map where the player is fixed to the grid and moves in full block increments. Then you had those 3D maze games where you were still on the grid and stuck moving in cardinal directions, but you got a 3D representation of the area. Then Wolfenstein allowed the player to move freely on the same grid map. Finally Doom (finally!) dispensed with the grid and made the map out of vectors.

wduquette•2h ago

Not knocking your history, but I gotta say that Wolfenstein-3D was like nothing I'd ever seen...and I played the original Wolfenstein on the Apple II--and the original Wizardry as well, which is a lot more to the point than Rogue IMHO. The Wizardry map grid and the Wolfenstein-3D map grid are really similar, now that I think about it.

romperstomper•4h ago

I'd say this is more like Wolfenstein 3D :)

gs17•3h ago

For some reason it's really common to call this kind of project a "Doom clone" despite it not having the features that made Doom notable at the time. Honestly, it's impressive enough that it doesn't need to be tied to being a "[90s game] clone".

lvogel•2h ago

That's just my age showing, I guess. For me, all 2.5D shooters are DOOMlikes. I was actually first thinking about calling it a Quake-like since IMHO that is much more well known for its multiplayer, but then I never got around to implement powerups and all the other stuff people might have expected.

to11mtm•12m ago

tbh feels like OG Wolf crossed with some early text based 'first person' RPG crossed with real time updates...

I suppose if there's one frustration it's that various 8/16bit dooms are out there including asciidoom and wondering why the better UX/vis of those weren't a thing...

alexchantavy•4h ago

Do it in Neo4j now lmao

ForHackernews•57m ago

There's also pg_doom that runs Doom as a Postgres extension https://github.com/DreamNik/pg_doom arguably less impressive because PG extensions can be normal(ish) C.

phoenixhaber•16m ago

I once made a doom emulator with a bandsaw and a pile of toothpicks but unfortunately I had difficulties cross compiling to a dumpster fire of banana peels.

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Building a DOOM-like multiplayer shooter in pure SQL

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