[google-appengine] Re: Text based RPG

[niklasr]

On Sep 3, 9:57 pm, Matthew Kramer  wrote:
> I'm really new with python and google appengine and I'm still trying
> to figure out how to work things with it. I'm going to try and make a
> text based rpg and I was wondering if anyone could give me some
> pointers and easy ways to get me started.
>
> Thanks for any help given :)
Common types are adventure, world, place, actor, thing, player, view,
command, and prioqueue. We may view an adventure in a view in a world
looking for some special thing. Important are both classes ie "thing"
with name and subclasses to food, tools, or creatues and also
wellchosen data structures to serve the purpose: a prio queue with
future, a binary tree to store the gamepath or a more advanced trie
structure and store actions taken on a stack to quickly access way
back and last move in a maze. A classic maze à la Zork, thing like
Dallas Quest or any classic renewed will be fun.
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[google-appengine] Re: Text based RPG

[Brandon N. Wirtz]

Python isn't an ideal language for this... HTML "Choose your own Adventure"
doesn't require any Python to work.

The Traditional Python Games don't use the web to render and can run in
realtime but doing that in html is a bit different... 

If you want to learn Python, and don't care if you learn GAE at the same
time you should check out  http://www.pygame.org 

-Brandon Wirtz

-Original Message-
From: google-appengine@googlegroups.com
[mailto:google-appeng...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of niklasr
Sent: Thursday, September 03, 2009 10:11 PM
To: Google App Engine
Subject: [google-appengine] Re: Text based RPG




On Sep 3, 9:57 pm, Matthew Kramer  wrote:
> I'm really new with python and google appengine and I'm still trying
> to figure out how to work things with it. I'm going to try and make a
> text based rpg and I was wondering if anyone could give me some
> pointers and easy ways to get me started.
>
> Thanks for any help given :)
Common types are adventure, world, place, actor, thing, player, view,
command, and prioqueue. We may view an adventure in a view in a world
looking for some special thing. Important are both classes ie "thing"
with name and subclasses to food, tools, or creatues and also
wellchosen data structures to serve the purpose: a prio queue with
future, a binary tree to store the gamepath or a more advanced trie
structure and store actions taken on a stack to quickly access way
back and last move in a maze. A classic maze à la Zork, thing like
Dallas Quest or any classic renewed will be fun.



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[google-appengine] Re: Text based RPG

[Matthew Kramer]

Brandon,

You're not understanding what I want to make, but that may be because
I didn't explain it very well. I want to sort of make something like
an old school based MUD using GAE. I am learning Python, just
wondering if there are any resources or tutorials that would get me
more into GAE with what I'd like to make. :)

On Sep 3, 10:46 pm, "Brandon N. Wirtz"  wrote:
> Python isn't an ideal language for this... HTML "Choose your own Adventure"
> doesn't require any Python to work.
>
> The Traditional Python Games don't use the web to render and can run in
> realtime but doing that in html is a bit different...
>
> If you want to learn Python, and don't care if you learn GAE at the same
> time you should check out  http://www.pygame.org
>
> -Brandon Wirtz
>
>
>
> -Original Message-
> From: google-appengine@googlegroups.com
>
> [mailto:google-appeng...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of niklasr
> Sent: Thursday, September 03, 2009 10:11 PM
> To: Google App Engine
> Subject: [google-appengine] Re: Text based RPG
>
> On Sep 3, 9:57 pm, Matthew Kramer  wrote:
> > I'm really new with python and google appengine and I'm still trying
> > to figure out how to work things with it. I'm going to try and make a
> > text based rpg and I was wondering if anyone could give me some
> > pointers and easy ways to get me started.
>
> > Thanks for any help given :)
> Common types are adventure, world, place, actor, thing, player, view,
> command, and prioqueue. We may view an adventure in a view in a world
> looking for some special thing. Important are both classes ie "thing"
> with name and subclasses to food, tools, or creatues and also
> wellchosen data structures to serve the purpose: a prio queue with
> future, a binary tree to store the gamepath or a more advanced trie
> structure and store actions taken on a stack to quickly access way
> back and last move in a maze. A classic maze à la Zork, thing like
> Dallas Quest or any classic renewed will be fun.
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[google-appengine] Re: Text based RPG

[Brandon N. Wirtz]

You could build one of these... You'd go broke running it.  A MUD is always
running.. It handles multiple threads and not only accepts requests but
sends them to the user.. 

GAE no process can run for more than a few seconds, so you'd have to use
some polling tricks on the client to ask what happened and have a chron job
run the main thread every few seconds... This would Be HUGELY expensive.
Not impossible to do... I don't have an good leads for where you'd get help
with this.  GAE just isn't designed for this kind of thing, and I think we
are back where I started of You'd have to have a "Client" that was Jscript
or Flash and it would talk to the Python backend via essentially web pages
or ajax or what ever data format you like but as port 80 text/binary
content... Not a Telnet like session.  And You'd have to ask for updates not
just have them pushed like the old muds would do. 

 I'd start a project like this writing a Chat program.  You say "Hello
World" and someone else receives it. From there you could start Tracking
what room people are in, and introduce small commands... You'd basically be
programming in GQL queries of "Who is in the room" and "what messages does
user have.  The amount of "Python" will be pretty small.

Hope this is help ful.



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[google-appengine] Re: Text based RPG

[David Given]

Brandon N. Wirtz wrote:
> You could build one of these... You'd go broke running it.  A MUD is always
> running.. It handles multiple threads and not only accepts requests but
> sends them to the user.. 

I actually *am* building something like one of these (using Java).

The biggest problem I've got is that GAE has no synchronisation 
mechanisms. None. There are transactions, but as they only work on 
single entities they're useless. This means that it's very hard to run 
game logic that needs to synchronously touch the global database.

To work round this I've implemented my own semaphore backed by the 
datastore; it's extremely nasty but does actually work. I then read the 
entire game database out of a blob in a single entity into RAM, run the 
game logic, write the database back again, and release the semaphore. 
That is also extremely nasty but it does all actually work. (My game's 
actually intended to be run on a standalone server, not GAE, but the 
persistence layers are all abstracted out to let me host on GAE for 
development purposes.) It'll congest rather badly but by the time 
congestion becomes an issue I should have a more suitable server.

Performance isn't bad; I'm usually getting request times of about 500ms 
when the server's hot. That breaks down to:

startup: anything from 10 to 5000ms
db load: 50ms
game logic:  <50ms
build client update: 50ms (varies according to the size of the update)
db save: 100ms

Startup time is very strange. Sometimes it's practically nil, usually 
it's 100ms or so, and if the server's not hot it something takes many 
seconds (together with weird warnings about failing to start the 
finalisation thread). It's all out of my control --- it happens before 
the app starts.

Note that the cheapest part of the whole process is actually running the 
game logic! Most of the time most requests take 0ms, as nothing will 
have actually happened since the last request...

> GAE no process can run for more than a few seconds, so you'd have to use
> some polling tricks on the client to ask what happened and have a chron job
> run the main thread every few seconds...

I'm running the game logic asynchronously on-demand. After all, you only 
need to change things when someone's looking! This works beautifully, 
but if it's been a couple of days since the last request it can take a 
while; I'm planning to use a cron job to update the server every half 
hour or so to avoid this.

If you're writing a text-based game things will be both easier and 
harder. Easier, in that you don't have to do all the complex database 
synchronisation between the client and the server that I'm doing, and 
harder, because the game logic itself will be more complex and the 
client will need to poll much more frequently. (I can get away with a 
poll every ten minutes or so. A MUD can't.)

-- 
┌─── ｄｇ＠ｃｏｗｌａｒｋ．ｃｏｍ ─ http://www.cowlark.com ─
│
│ "They laughed at Newton. They laughed at Einstein. Of course, they
│ also laughed at Bozo the Clown." --- Carl Sagan

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[google-appengine] Re: Text based RPG

[Nick Johnson (Google)]

Hi David,

On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 10:24 AM, David Given  wrote:

>
> Brandon N. Wirtz wrote:
> > You could build one of these... You'd go broke running it.  A MUD is
> always
> > running.. It handles multiple threads and not only accepts requests but
> > sends them to the user..
>
> I actually *am* building something like one of these (using Java).
>
> The biggest problem I've got is that GAE has no synchronisation
> mechanisms. None. There are transactions, but as they only work on
> single entities they're useless. This means that it's very hard to run
> game logic that needs to synchronously touch the global database.
>

Not true - Transactions can encompass entire entity groups. With the correct
entity group configuration, you could perform updates on local areas of the
map transactionally.


> To work round this I've implemented my own semaphore backed by the
> datastore; it's extremely nasty but does actually work. I then read the
> entire game database out of a blob in a single entity into RAM, run the
> game logic, write the database back again, and release the semaphore.
> That is also extremely nasty but it does all actually work. (My game's
> actually intended to be run on a standalone server, not GAE, but the
> persistence layers are all abstracted out to let me host on GAE for
> development purposes.) It'll congest rather badly but by the time
> congestion becomes an issue I should have a more suitable server.
>
> Performance isn't bad; I'm usually getting request times of about 500ms
> when the server's hot. That breaks down to:
>
> startup: anything from 10 to 5000ms
> db load: 50ms
> game logic:  <50ms
> build client update: 50ms (varies according to the size of the update)
> db save: 100ms
>
> Startup time is very strange. Sometimes it's practically nil, usually
> it's 100ms or so, and if the server's not hot it something takes many
> seconds (together with weird warnings about failing to start the
> finalisation thread). It's all out of my control --- it happens before
> the app starts.
>
> Note that the cheapest part of the whole process is actually running the
> game logic! Most of the time most requests take 0ms, as nothing will
> have actually happened since the last request...
>
> > GAE no process can run for more than a few seconds, so you'd have to use
> > some polling tricks on the client to ask what happened and have a chron
> job
> > run the main thread every few seconds...
>
> I'm running the game logic asynchronously on-demand. After all, you only
> need to change things when someone's looking! This works beautifully,
> but if it's been a couple of days since the last request it can take a
> while; I'm planning to use a cron job to update the server every half
> hour or so to avoid this.
>
> If you're writing a text-based game things will be both easier and
> harder. Easier, in that you don't have to do all the complex database
> synchronisation between the client and the server that I'm doing, and
> harder, because the game logic itself will be more complex and the
> client will need to poll much more frequently. (I can get away with a
> poll every ten minutes or so. A MUD can't.)
>
> --
> ┌─── ｄｇ＠ｃｏｗｌａｒｋ．ｃｏｍ ─ http://www.cowlark.com ─
> │
> │ "They laughed at Newton. They laughed at Einstein. Of course, they
> │ also laughed at Bozo the Clown." --- Carl Sagan
>
> >
>


-- 
Nick Johnson, Developer Programs Engineer, App Engine

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[google-appengine] Re: Text based RPG

[David Given]

Nick Johnson (Google) wrote:
[...]
> Not true - Transactions can encompass entire entity groups. With the 
> correct entity group configuration, you could perform updates on local 
> areas of the map transactionally.

Is it possible to directly access entities in a group other than the 
root one? I was under the impression not (but I could well be wrong).

And I'm afraid it still wouldn't help --- I'd still need synchronisation 
between different groups when dealing with multiple areas on the map; 
and AppEngine's transactions are optimistic rather than blocking, which 
are no use to me.

In addition the overhead to performing a single database access appears 
to be so high that it's *much* faster to read and write the entire 
database in two accesses than it is to read parts of it using multiple 
queries! Although that may change as the database size grows.

-- 
┌─── ｄｇ＠ｃｏｗｌａｒｋ．ｃｏｍ ─ http://www.cowlark.com ─
│
│ "They laughed at Newton. They laughed at Einstein. Of course, they
│ also laughed at Bozo the Clown." --- Carl Sagan

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[google-appengine] Re: Text based RPG

[Nick Johnson (Google)]

On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 11:21 AM, David Given  wrote:

>
> Nick Johnson (Google) wrote:
> [...]
> > Not true - Transactions can encompass entire entity groups. With the
> > correct entity group configuration, you could perform updates on local
> > areas of the map transactionally.
>
> Is it possible to directly access entities in a group other than the
> root one? I was under the impression not (but I could well be wrong).
>

Yes - child entities act in all respects like any other entity, except that
they have a parent entity (or entities).


>
> And I'm afraid it still wouldn't help --- I'd still need synchronisation
> between different groups when dealing with multiple areas on the map;
> and AppEngine's transactions are optimistic rather than blocking, which
> are no use to me.
>

Presumably transactions across local groups are rarer; there are a number of
proposals for distributed transactions on App Engine. You can also use your
locking strategy, but restrict that to when you need to do a cross-region
transaction, significantly reducing contention.


>
> In addition the overhead to performing a single database access appears
> to be so high that it's *much* faster to read and write the entire
> database in two accesses than it is to read parts of it using multiple
> queries! Although that may change as the database size grows.
>

Indeed - with a single entity you're limited to 1MB, and you're reading a
lot of superfluous data. If you size your regions right, you can read the
whole region with a single query, and write only the changed parts back.

-Nick Johnson


>
> --
> ┌─── ｄｇ＠ｃｏｗｌａｒｋ．ｃｏｍ ─ http://www.cowlark.com ─
> │
> │ "They laughed at Newton. They laughed at Einstein. Of course, they
> │ also laughed at Bozo the Clown." --- Carl Sagan
>
> >
>


-- 
Nick Johnson, Developer Programs Engineer, App Engine

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Re: [google-appengine] Re: Text based RPG

[martin n]

On Tuesday, September 8, 2009 at 6:54:26 AM UTC+2, Brandon Wirtz wrote:
>
> ... Not a Telnet like session. . . 
>
> Have similar telnet-related question.
Is GAE able to accept incoming telnet connection ?
Or any google's service ?

For my game is  telnet compatibility neccessary.

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Re: [google-appengine] Re: Text based RPG

['Alex Martelli' via Google App Engine]

On Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 5:39 AM, martin n <3inf.dr...@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Tuesday, September 8, 2009 at 6:54:26 AM UTC+2, Brandon Wirtz wrote:
>>
>> ... Not a Telnet like session. . .
>>
>> Have similar telnet-related question.
>
Is GAE able to accept incoming telnet connection ?
>

No: HTTP, HTTPS.


> Or any google's service ?
>

You may want to look at Google Compute Engine.


Alex


>
> For my game is  telnet compatibility neccessary.
>
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Re: [google-appengine] Re: Text based RPG

[martin n]

>
> You may want to look at Google Compute Engine.
>
> Thanks for tip.
Will try it ASAP. 

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