> Comments and suggestions welcome :-) hi Joachim. i have some suggestions:
apache: use fastcgi instead of hacking an own http-server. <http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~bringert/darcs/haskell-fastcgi/doc/> <http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~bringert/darcs/cgi-compat/doc/> server: there are virtual linux servers out there, free to rent. some of them are even cheaper than the power-usage of one's old pc (at least compared to speed). if you intend to write a game for thousands of users, who play it 24/7, then it may be comfortable to rent one. (friends of me rented one.) software upgrades: use Read/Show classes instead of Foreign.Marshal, and combine them with version counting data-structures: [code] data MyData = V1 String deriving (Show,Read) read_v1 :: MyData -> String --------- data MyData = V1 String | V2 [String] deriving (Show,Read) read_v1 :: MyData -> String read_v2 :: MyData -> [String] --------- data MyData = V1 String | V2 [String] | V3 [(String,Int)] deriving (Show,Read) -- obsolete: read_v1 :: MyData -> String read_v2 :: MyData -> [String] read_v3 :: MyData -> [(String,Int)] [/code] i've thought about writing a browsergame in haskel, too; but atm, i have no time for (writing) games. - marc Am Montag, 18. Dezember 2006 12:30 schrieb Joachim Durchholz: > OK, after years of looking and discussing and doing HSoE exercises, I > have finally decided that Haskell is far enough into practical > usefulness that I should give it a try in a "real" project. > > The basic idea is a browser game - this touches all the potentially hard > issues without miring me too deeply in target platform details. > > I'd like to lay out my plans here and ask how they are going to work > out, and take advice. > > THE PLAN > > I'll start with > http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/How_to_write_a_Haskell_program and get a > toolchain together. I haven't decides which compiler (interpreter?) to > choose; I'll probably go for the one that give the least amount of trouble. > > Next would be library selection. I'm willing to undergo some modest > amount of hassle here, since I don't expect all libraries that I need to > be mature yet. > > My preliminary plan is to split the application into a central world > simulation process, and satellite processes that accept HTTP requests, > feed them into the simulation, read back the results, and generate the > response HTML. > The interface between simulation and satellite is: > * Satellites can read a snapshot of the game data. > * Satellites cannot directly write game data. > What they can do is to post commands to a blackboard, which are marked > as "no more updatable" as soon as the simulation starts executing > them. > > I expect the simulation and the satellites to be separate OS processes, > so I'll need a way to marshall command and game data between processes. > The simulation will have to store its entire state to disk, too - in > theory, it could run forever and never write to disk (and I don't need a > database, too), but in practice, I have to plan for the occasional reboot. > Since the server will be running Apache for other purposes anyway, and I > don't want to force the players to use a URL with a port number, I think > I'll set up Apache so that it proxies game-related URLs to the Haskell > software. I just hope that Apache doesn't incur much overhead in that mode. > > I have no idea how to organize software upgrades. The satellites are > easy, but how do I make sure that revision N+1 of the simulation can > read the marshalled data from revision N? > > The final software should be efficient. Ideally, the satellites are able > to saturate the network card of today's typical cheap rootserver if the > simulation is a no-op. > I have two data points for a "typical cheap rootserver": > * 100 MBit/s Ethernet, 256 MB RAM, 1.2 GHz Celeron (~3 years old) > * 1 GBit/s Ethernet, 1 GB RAM, 2.2 GHz Athlon (current) > Of course, not needing an RDBMS will give the system a head start > efficiency-wise. > > > Comments and suggestions welcome :-) > > Regards, > Jo > > _______________________________________________ > Haskell-Cafe mailing list > Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org > http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe > _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
