Hi,
I'm trying to see if it's feasible to write a game using app engine as the
backend.
The task I'm most worried about is the discoverability of games. A user can
create a new game (which creates a Game object in the datastore). Then
other users can hit an endpoint to get a listing of open games, sorted by
creation date.
Creating a new game will be a very low frequency operation, so no worries
there. Users polling for new open games will be much higher in frequency
though. Each time a user requests a listing of games, I need to go fetch a
page of Game objects from the datastore. Let's say a page size = 20. And
the Game object looks like this:
class Game {
String name;
long timestampCreated;
long timestampStarted;
String mapName;
String hostUsername;
int numPlayersMax;
List<String> playerNames; // usernames of other players currently
joined
Text gameState; // game state as serialized json string
}
the query would be something like:
select Games where timestampStarted = 0
and playerNames.size() < numPlayersMax
order by timestampCreated DESC limit 20;
First, I'm hoping it's possible to avoid loading the Text field in this
listings query since it's not needed for rendering yet. Still there would
be a fair number of fields to fetch and deserialize, and I'm afraid my
costs would quickly make it impractical.
I could try keeping a list of open games in memcache, but not sure if I
could achieve consistency between the memcache state and the datastore
state of games. Will be looking into that.
I've got a very similar game to this already published, using a single
jetty instance + mysql on one machine. It's starting to get too much
traffic now, and scaling would be a pain. App engine's scalability looks
great for something like this, but not sure if the # of writes and
inefficient reads I need to perform are a good idea.
Any general thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated. I'm starting to
dig into this now and any thoughts on how you'd implement the above would
be great. In my already-published game (mentioned above), I ran a dark test
where I'd call through to a (quickly implemented) mirror of the game
running on app engine. It quickly ate through the daily quota!
Thanks
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