What’s Erlang Spacewar?
A multiplayer version of Spacewar! built in Erlang with Cowboy using websockets. For the moment, it’s quite basic and really intended to be a proof-of-concept. The idea was to see if it is even possible to use websockets for this sort of thing.
Right now I’m just trying to get a sense of how it performs on a tiny little EC2 VM so I’d be most grateful if you could grab a couple friends and jump in when you have a few minutes to spare. Fair warning: I fully expect it to fall over and die if there are more than 50 or so people in there but I guess we’ll find out.
I’ll give you the link to play, don’t worry, just a couple quick things…
How Long Will It Work For?
I’m going to keep it live (aside from crashes, etc) for at least a couple of weeks I think.
What You Need:
A browser that supports websockets and HTML canvas. Think recent versions of Chrome and Firefox, Safari should work.
Problems You Can Expect
It’s Ugly
And I know. No explosions yet, very minimal.
It’s Choppy Sometimes
It’s running on a t1.micro in Amazon EC2’s us-east-1 region.
Translation: it’s got less than a full CPU core (really just uses spare cycles from other bigger VMs) and it’s in Virginia so if you’re on the West coast like me, expect some lag.
Crashes/Termination
I’ll be messing with the code for the next week so do expect unavailability due to upgrades and crashes.
Please Do
Play it and tell me what you think
I know about choppiness and ugliness but if you find any other frustrating bits (or even stuff you love), please do tell me in the comments or on Twitter.
Share the link
But please share the link to this blog post – I’d like to give all test players the same warnings/notes I’m giving you.
Are You Going To Release The Source?
Yes. It’ll be reasonably open (probably BSD or MIT license) on my github account within a couple of weeks. I’m still cleaning things up and moving to gen_server/proper OTP instead of bare Erlang processes.
For the record, the repository will contain the grim history of almost all my mistakes. It’s been a learning experience.
Shut Up And Let Me Play!
Of course. Here’s the game, don’t forget to enter a username and click “Start Playing”: Erlang Websocket Spacewar!