I'm looking at using cloud firestore to sync a multiplayer web game between players. However, this game involves continuous motion, like a player dragging a piece from one place to another. This would involve a stream of writes as its position changes. Given that the free plan is 20k free writes per day, and 20k writes can be done by a dozen players in a few minutes in this case, I worry that the cost would rapidly spiral out of control.
Is it impossible to do this sort of thing with firestore? I'm basically talking about a continuous websocket connection keeping the game data synced between players.
The limits of Firestore are well-documented. You haven't really said what hard limits you're concerned about exceeding. The only thing you've indicated is limits regarding the perpetual free tier, which can be easily exceeded by simply paying for the product based on your usage.
If you're not willing to pay for the service based on your needs, then you should probably look for another service. If you are willing to pay, then you need to do the math to figure out what your specific needs are, and if they can be met by the documented limits.
In the absence of more specific information about what you're trying to achieve, there's not much else that can be said.
Related
I'm working on my multiplayer game. The game is about pvp, you can shoot your friends and all stuff like that. I decided to make a score widget, which would show who is better. You might have seen something similar to what I'm talking about in fps games like csgo, valorant, overwatch, etc. Everyone should see the score.
I tried storing variables on servers character pawn. But pawn can be destroyed and score rollbacks to 0:0.
For replicated data that is persistent to respawn, you have two main options with the built-in game framework:
Create your own subclass of AGameState and the replicated data you want in it. There is one Game state and it is replicated on all clients. See what the official wiki (bottom of the page) says about GameState. You can store game-related data in it as total kill count in team deathmatches or team capture points in domination matches.
Create your own subclass of APlayerState and the replicated data you want in it. There is one Player state per player and it is replicated on all clients. See the official API of APlayerState. You can store each players' kill count in it for example or the number of objective a player captured. Make sure data is fed from the server and replicated to clients and not the other way around.
Unreal Engine comes with a powerful Game Framework, make sure to get familiar with it.
So I'm making an app that involves streaming audio(radio-like) from the Google Cloud Storage and was looking into the costs. It seems it would be much too expensive as is.
e.g. Lets say I have 10MB audio files, a user listens to 20 files a day and I have 2000 active users. That's 400GBs or $48/day. i.e. ~$1440/month just for that.
I then looked into putting a CDN in front of it, to minimize direct reads from the Storage. Now initially that made sense to me. The CDN would cache the audio files and the clients would be getting the files from the cache most of the time. However, as I was looking at Fastly's pricing (Fastly is a Google partner and seems like a good fit) I noticed that they seem to be pricing bandwidth usage to their cache at the exact same rate as Google cloud does ($0.12/GB). So unless I'm reading this wrong, putting up the CDN would not save me ANY money. Now I get that there are other reasons why putting a CDN in front of it could be a good idea, but am I really reading this right?
Also, if you have any other tips on how I should set this up, I'm all ears.
Estimating the invoice of such a service is a complex matter. To get an informed answer and tips regarding possible implementation paths I would suggest reaching out to a GCP Sales representative. Similarly you should contact the Fastly team to get a precise picture of their pricing model.
Moreover, any estimate we could make here would be outdated as soon as any of the respective pricing model changes, which would invalidate the answer and probably drive future readers to wrong conclusions.
I'm looking to re-code an application to better handle spikes in tweets. I'm moving to Heroku and MongoDB (either MongoLab or MongoHQ) for the database solution.
During certain news events, tweet volume might spike to 15,000 / second. Typically with each tweet, I parse the tweet and store various pieces of data such as user data, etc. My idea is to store the raw tweets in a separate collection, and have a separate process grab raw tweets and parse them. The goal here is when there is a massive spike in tweets, my application isn't trying to parse all of these, but is essentially backlogging the raw tweets in another collection. As the volume slows, the process can take care of the backlog over time.
My question is three fold:
Can MongoDB handle this type of volume with regards to inserts into a collection at a rate of 15,000 tweets per second?
Any idea on the better setup: MongoHQ or MongoLab?
Any feedback on the overall setup?
Thanks!
The write volume that it will handle depends on lots of factors - hardware, indexes, size of each document, etc. Your best bet is to test it in the environment you're planning to use. If the demands of the write load exceed the capacity of a single mongo server, you can always use just multiple shards.
They are very similar, but there are some differences in pricing and the actual site design has a bunch of differences. There's a thread of discussion about it here: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/20782/mongodb-hosting-mongolab-vs-mongohq-vs-mongomachine
Overall it seems to make sense. Sounds like you will probably want to flesh out some details about how you will be processing the backlog. Will you be polling it by querying periodically, deleting tweets from the backlog as it processes them, etc.
Completely agree on the need to test this. In general, mongo can handle that many writes, but in practice it depends on the size of your set up, other operations, indexes, etc.
I had to do a similar approach for collecting tons of metrics data. I used a lightweight event-machine process to accept incoming requests in parallel, and store them in a simple format, then another process would take those requests and send them up to a central server. The main goal was to make sure no data was lost if the central server was down, but it also allowed me to put in some throttling logic so that the spikes in data wouldn't overwhelm the system.
I'd be interested to see how this works out for you price-wise, vs. a vps like linode. (I'm a huge Heroku fan, but with certain architectures it can get pricey quickly)
We’re creating a massively-multiplayer social game. We expect up to 1 million concurrent users. The game is not real-time, instead it’s turn-based. We need reliable messaging between our clients and the server, preferably over HTTP protocol.
Besides the multiplayer functionality, we’ll also need a content delivery service.
Could you please recommend a server-side technology for us, so we’ll start searching for the right people to hire?
Is it correct assumption that no single server will hold that amount of load so it must scale horizontally?
Will Windows Azure do the job?
Thanks in advance.
Hmmm... gaming, concurrency, server?
G-WAN (200 KB, full-ANSI C scripts included).
This is the best candidate -by far. And it lets you grow horizontally with load-balancing as time goes (you will not have 1 million users the day you ship the game).
I know they are workng on applets (client-side) so you might benefit asking them the question.
[quote]a million concurrent users IS NOT a real number by any means[/quote]
There are games that have this concurrency, and more. Most of the popular Facebook games do, while they have their 15 days in the sun. That being said, having to solve that problem is a nice problem to have :-)
It's probably possible to write such a system on Azure, but you'd probably be piloting in uncharted waters, and you'd also have to pay Microsoft for the hosting. Compare to Amazon ECC for pricing, for example, and perhaps another approach would be better.
Other technologies to consider, depending on what it is you're really trying to do:
- J2EE
- Erlang/OTP
- Python/Twisted
Also, the networking and multiplayer game FAQ on gamedev.net: http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/showfaq.asp?forum_id=15
Is it [a] correct assumption that no single server will hold that amount of load so it must scale horizontally?
Yes. It depends on how much work the server has to do per person, but I'd say 1 million concurrent users would require more than one server.
Will Windows Azure do the job?
Windows Azure will provide the computers and the storage for a fee. You have to provide the software and make sure the software can scale horizontally.
Is it correct assumption that no
single server will hold that amount of
load so it must scale horizontally?
No, that is nao avalid assumption. There are servers that are HUGH - 1000+ processors (not on a cluster). Also, a million concurrent users IS NOT a real number by any means - that would be way too much a slice of the concurrent facebook users. And it totally depends no what you do in your game. TUrn based could be chess, and I would not have a problem hostin 1.000.000 concurrent chess boards on a high end server with let's say 256gb memory.
Realistically, though, you possibly will scale horizontaly. First, it makes no sense to ahve a million people in one game / world (even eve online scales horizontally by solar system), second it is likely cheaper than buying a super big computer.
Will Windows Azure do the job?
Hahaha. Seriously. Scaling horizontally - yes.
Look at the price, calcualte up an nistance for a month, compare to dedicated server and laugh on the way to the shop. Nice for very varsying load, bad for base load.
Comapre mid range server (8-12cores, 64gb RAM) to an azure instance and iti s clear ONE azure instance is not going to compare.
Does anyone know how sites that have a real-time feed of a lot of data work? I am referring to something like a stock site, where they can tell you in real time (well, 20 minute delay mostly, but still real-time - 20 minutes as I understand it).
They have thousands of data pieces delivered to them every second, I would imagine: MSFT 25.00 +.23 VOL 12000 ???? for each stock that had a change during some interval.
So, is there just a constant feed of small pushes going on? Or do you think a site will pull from the place that has the real data and say "give me all changes since 12:23:45 CST to now" type query?
I ask this because at work we might have a situation where we need to have at our application's fingertips real time information like this, and it won't make sense to hit our third party provider over and over and over again every second...
Generally there is a server/client protocol defined between the 2 parties. In the company I work for the connection is maintained at all times.
Here is info on real time data feeds to go with your stock example
NYSE,NASDAQ
It is common for data providers to also have FTP sites with (delayed) batched data. One that comes to mind is the NWS EMWIN
Sites like Twitter feed data to certain approved sites in real-time via XMPP (Wiki link).
In the broadest terms, a push model is going to be the best way of achieving "real time" transfer, particularly if you're talking about a large amount of data.
However you do always have a problem when using a purely push model of how to recover from missed data.
Depending on the nature of your data that may not be a problem (thinking of video delivery as an analogue, where the amount of data is huge but there is sufficient redundancy for it to recover from missing data). And if you have any control over the data you may be able to build some redundancy in. For example, on every change event you can provide absolute values rather than changes, or previous value and new value.
I've done this making an attempt to retrieve the stock quote from the source, and falling back to a timestamped on-disk cache of the quote when the main source fails or times out.