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

[Amir Karimi]

Thanks Guido, this is good idea but as I'm not going to make this game distributed (at least in the near future) I feel this approach increases the complexity and I don't know what would I get instead of this complexity? (except for RAM usage optimization) The reason why I decided to use Akka is to make things simpler. For example I believe Akka would help me to handle the game entity states in a very simple and concise way. But it introduces new concerns about RAM usage. It can be handled with the help of Akka persistence and supervisors although it's not as simple as I thought. On 06/19/2015 11:40 AM, Guido Medina wrote: You can activate an actor if not present, as long as you send the message to its supervisor, so you have to keep say, supervisors per zone? and each supervisor will try to send/forward the message to such child and if not present create it. This is an example in Java where I do the same thing for account, the accounts actors are not eagerly created but on demand, the following method is inside the supervisor actor class: private void applyToAccount(Currency currency, BalanceOperation operation) {     final ActorContext context = context();     context.child(currency.code).       getOrElse(new AbstractFunction0<ActorRef>() {         @Override         public ActorRef apply() {           return context.actorOf(balancePersistorProps(currency), currency.code);         }       }).tell(operation, noSender());   } HTH, Guido. On Friday, June 19, 2015 at 7:48:43 AM UTC+1, Amir Karimi wrote: I think It's not enough. There are events which will happen when the user is not logged in. For example an attack on a village (which its owner is inactive) or occupation of that village also generates a message to the owner player actor (which is not resident) as well. So I can't activate them just at login times. On Thursday, June 18, 2015 at 3:55:03 PM UTC+4:30, Guido Medina wrote: You can set context time out for actors, if they don't receive a message within some time passivate them, activate them at login, that way you don't have to lazy load when the player is active but at login which will basically happen asynchronously. Now, Akka experts should tell us if setting context timeout for many active actors is a bad idea. HTH, Guido. On Thursday, June 18, 2015 at 8:57:30 AM UTC+1, Amir Karimi wrote: 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 a topic in the Google Groups "Akka User List" group. To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/akka-user/IAyHHn1vJL4/unsubscribe. To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, 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. -- Amir Karimi (+98) 912 211 9506 www.dev-frame.com -- >>>>>>>>>> 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.