[akka-user] Modeling a simple MMO game entities as actors? Is it OK?

[Amir Karimi]

Hi, I'm working on a simple MMO game as a side project which is like Travian. I've decided to use Akka as the game back-end, so I would like to share my design with you. Your suggestions and feedbacks are very appreciated. Each of the following entities are modeled as an actor: - Player - Village - Building of a village - etc. Villages have some resources which are constantly decreasing or increasing based on multiple factors like buildings level, village population, etc. (Clearly, I'm not going to change the resource values periodically but I save the last resource value, its time and the coefficient of increase or decrease.) Each player may have multiple villages. As villages can be conquered by other players, each village has an state for it's owner player (e.g. playerId or playerActorRef) and also a player has a list of his/her own villages (village actors or IDs). Each village may contains multiple buildings. As buildings won't be moved and owned by other villages, they will be created as village actor children. So the buildings will communicate with their village through `context.parent`. For persisting the game world state I'm going to use Akka persistence module. This is the fundamental of my design although I have several concerns: I'm not sure if players profile information should be stored into the database or into the player actors (as states). According to 80/20 rule, I except 80% of the players to be much less active than the others but their corresponding actors are still resident in the memory even if they have no activity at all. What are the best practices to reduce the RAM usage for those? How can I show the statics and other information in the admin panel? For example I want to be able to search among players and get their information. I know I can use actorSelection with wildcard but what about data pagination? I'm not going to load all players information. First of all please let me know if this is a good idea to use actors for such project. I'm not sure if this approach will make things more complex or simpler. Thanks a lot, Amir -- >>>>>>>>>> Read the docs: http://akka.io/docs/ >>>>>>>>>> Check the FAQ: http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/current/additional/faq.html >>>>>>>>>> Search the archives: https://groups.google.com/group/akka-user --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Akka User List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to akka-user+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to akka-user@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/akka-user. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.