Comments

• Kyleran Member LegendaryPosts: 44,057

  March 10 edited March 10

  Not very far off from release eh? Perhaps they should get their SpacetimeDB working properly first?
  
  This gentlemen tried to tinker a bit with it recently but could not get past the issues he shares in his post to get his test project to work. He concludes as follows:
  
  

  "Quite frankly I was out of patience at this point and decided to end the tinkering here.

  SpacetimeDB Issues

  I had planned to test out these things and make sure they were indeed issues before I wrote about them but as I was unable to get the code working correctly I only have reading the docs to go on. Apologies if I am off with any of these.

  Authorizations / Row Level Security

  The first big issue I noticed with Spacetime is there is no concept of "Authorization" or "Row Level Security" that is there is no way that some information can be private from other users.

  This is obviously critical for most (if not all) games. You need to hide some information from other players. For example in BattleTabs each player hides their ship positions from each other until the end of the battle, without this players could cheat by looking at the data that the server sends down or could directly issue queries to the database and retrieve that information.

  When queried about this on discord I was informed that that is indeed coming and that there is a concept of "Private Tables" that you designate by prefixing your table with an underscore.

  Without any docs on this im not sure exactly how this would work in a real game and how much work this might be for the user to implement.

  Migrations

  I could find no mention of how DB migrations are supposed to work in their docs (despite their AI docs search assuring me there are 12 references)

  

  This to me is one of the MAJOR benefits of the way convex works you can very easily migrate your database by changing the schema definition which then validates every single document in the the DB. This is a far more flexible way of structuring your tables than traditional relational databases but still ensuring the strong relational structure and type-safety enforced by your schema.

  Im not exactly sure how SpacetimeDB works under the hood but they talk about replaying a Write Ahead Log, so im interested to know how you would go about evolving your schema over time

  Physics

  I have big questions around how you would integrate this in a Unity project that requires server-authoritative physics or other game-engine features. Perhaps you are expected to implement those yourself? Perhaps you are supposed to run Unity headless server instances in parallel and query those from Spacetime?

  Open questions for next time.

  Conclusion

  This post is getting quite long and is getting quite negative. I dont want it to come across that way, I think SpacetimeDB is an interesting technology and is in a niche (realtime relational database targeted at game developers) that is very interesting to me.

  I just feel like perhaps its a bit too early for the project and it needs to bake for a good while longer before its ready for further tinkering."

  https://mikecann.co.uk/posts/tinkering-with-spacetime-db
  

  "True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde 
  

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• Kilrain Member RarePosts: 1,185

  March 10

  Kyleran said:

  Not very far off from release eh? Perhaps they should get their SpacetimeDB working properly first?
  
  This gentlemen tried to tinker a bit with it recently but could not get past the issues he shares in his post to get his test project to work. He concludes as follows:
  
  

  "Quite frankly I was out of patience at this point and decided to end the tinkering here.

  SpacetimeDB Issues

  I had planned to test out these things and make sure they were indeed issues before I wrote about them but as I was unable to get the code working correctly I only have reading the docs to go on. Apologies if I am off with any of these.

  Authorizations / Row Level Security

  The first big issue I noticed with Spacetime is there is no concept of "Authorization" or "Row Level Security" that is there is no way that some information can be private from other users.

  This is obviously critical for most (if not all) games. You need to hide some information from other players. For example in BattleTabs each player hides their ship positions from each other until the end of the battle, without this players could cheat by looking at the data that the server sends down or could directly issue queries to the database and retrieve that information.

  When queried about this on discord I was informed that that is indeed coming and that there is a concept of "Private Tables" that you designate by prefixing your table with an underscore.

  Without any docs on this im not sure exactly how this would work in a real game and how much work this might be for the user to implement.

  Migrations

  I could find no mention of how DB migrations are supposed to work in their docs (despite their AI docs search assuring me there are 12 references)

  

  This to me is one of the MAJOR benefits of the way convex works you can very easily migrate your database by changing the schema definition which then validates every single document in the the DB. This is a far more flexible way of structuring your tables than traditional relational databases but still ensuring the strong relational structure and type-safety enforced by your schema.

  Im not exactly sure how SpacetimeDB works under the hood but they talk about replaying a Write Ahead Log, so im interested to know how you would go about evolving your schema over time

  Physics

  I have big questions around how you would integrate this in a Unity project that requires server-authoritative physics or other game-engine features. Perhaps you are expected to implement those yourself? Perhaps you are supposed to run Unity headless server instances in parallel and query those from Spacetime?

  Open questions for next time.

  Conclusion

  This post is getting quite long and is getting quite negative. I dont want it to come across that way, I think SpacetimeDB is an interesting technology and is in a niche (realtime relational database targeted at game developers) that is very interesting to me.

  I just feel like perhaps its a bit too early for the project and it needs to bake for a good while longer before its ready for further tinkering."

  https://mikecann.co.uk/posts/tinkering-with-spacetime-db
  

  When I first heard about SpacialOS, I mean, SpacetimeDB I read through their documentation and this was the first question I had:
  
  
  
  This is the kind of thing I dislike about writing my own servers so why would I bother with a third party solution? Perhaps it's going to be good, but for now I can't think of a reason not to just roll my own stuff.