A New Approach to Databases and Data Processing — Simulating 10Ks of Spaceships

General Discussions
#1

Hi.
Yesterday I published a new blog post on our company blog: http://blog.paralleluniverse.co/post/44146699200/spaceships

It showcases a 10Ks spaceship battle simulation we’ve built on top of our spatial DB, which was built in Java. The point of the post is not to show how fast the simulation can run because there are faster ways to do it. The idea is to show how even a naive solution running on top of the right kind of database can achieve decent performance and good scaling.

I think some of you may find this interesting.

#2

Sorry it’s TL so I read your code part only.

So basically you hold a list for each type (sbase) and perform their job one by one on main’s loop? Mostly of us do that and hit performance problem on how well you
a) get/maintain the list
b) perform each object’s behavior

OT: nice spaceship logo, how you draw it?

#3

I read that post from the Hacker News link. I disagree with what you imply about Java not being a language designed for concurrency. Defining “designed for concurrency” as “doesn’t have mutable state” is a religious argument, not a technical one. Mutable state is has potential downfalls compared to immutable state but it’s also less efficient. This is a technical trade off, not a issue of capability nor appropriateness.

#4

I also read your article, sadly it describes nothing in detail. You talk much about theoretical stuff, which can be interesting, but is not what the article said it was about.
I know of course that you want to promote your super cool spatial search engine, but there isn’t much information about that either. :’(

So in the end, I don’t really know what you are doing so special. Perhaps it is, but I can’t know how it compares to normal simple data structures we already use in games.

[quote=“kaffiene,post:3,topic:41117”]
I think it is a valid point against Java, other languages have better constructs, rules and libraries to deal with concurrency.

#5

I agree that the lack of real information in that post was very sad…

What Java doesn’t have, Riven adds :slight_smile:

Mike

#6

The demo is open-sourced under the MIT license, and SpaceBase itself is available for download, with full documentation, here: http://paralleluniverse.co

The post was meant to give the theoretical background. I believe you can find all the details in the user guide and the demo code.