UnitOfTime

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Take up your weapon in this RPG bullet-hell world and embark on a journey to right wrongs from long ago. Only you can defeat the evil forces of the Undying guardians and reunite the world with the fabled Archvale.

Archvale

⁍ Discord: https://discord.gg/63YeahMKfJ
⁍ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/UnitOfTime
⁍ Github: https://github.com/sponsors/unitoftime
⁍ Twitter: https://twitter.com/UnitOfTime
⁍ Play: https://unit.dev/mmo

// Description
This week I added dungeons! The game is handwritten in Go.

// Chapters
0:00 - Intro
0:30 - Instances
1:30 - Portals
1:42 - Generation
2:43 - Boss?
3:08 - Boss!
3:34 - Thanks!

Instanced Dungeons and the First Raid Boss

⁍ Discord: https://discord.gg/63YeahMKfJ
⁍ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/UnitOfTime
⁍ Github: https://github.com/sponsors/unitoftime
⁍ Twitter: https://twitter.com/UnitOfTime
⁍ Play: https://unit.dev/mmo

// References
⁍ Redblobgames: https://www.redblobgames.com/articles/probability/damage-rolls.html

// Description
This week I added lootbags to my game! The game is handwritten in Go.

// Chapters
0:00 - Intro
0:12 - Cleanup
1:50 - Loot!
2:22 - Inventory System
2:48 - Loot Bags
3:20 - Loot Tables
3:52 - Thanks!

// Credits:
Music by https://www.bensound.com/free-music-for-videos
License code: AU8THTN70N7JNYCE

Adding loot, drop tables, and a doing a little cleanup

⁍ Discord: https://discord.gg/63YeahMKfJ
⁍ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/UnitOfTime
⁍ Github: https://github.com/sponsors/unitoftime
⁍ Twitter: https://twitter.com/UnitOfTime
⁍ Play: https://unit.dev/mmo

// References
⁍ Archvale: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1296360
⁍ 0x72 Assets: https://0x72.itch.io/
⁍ LDTK: https://ldtk.io/

// Description
This week I worked on making my mmo look better. I added a lot of special effects and added some better artwork in from an asset pack. The game is handwritten in Go.

Improving visual effects in my MMO

⁍ Discord: https://discord.gg/63YeahMKfJ
⁍ Twitter: https://bit.ly/UnitOfTimeOnTwitter
⁍ Play: https://unit.dev/mmo
⁍ Github: https://github.com/unitoftime

// References
⁍ Ebitengine: https://ebitengine.org/
⁍ Javascript EventLoop: https://youtu.be/cCOL7MC4Pl0

// Description
This week I implemented a wave defense mode, improved the collision detection by using spatial hashes, and struggled through some performance problems in Firefox.

Wave Defense Spatial Hashes, and the Pain of Performance [MMO Devlog]

⁍ Discord: https://discord.gg/63YeahMKfJ
⁍ Twitter: https://bit.ly/UnitOfTimeOnTwitter
⁍ Play: https://unit.dev/mmo
⁍ Github: https://github.com/unitoftime

// Articles
⁍ Left (Sander Mertens): https://ajmmertens.medium.com/doing-a-lot-with-a-little-ecs-identifiers-25a72bd2647
⁍ Right (Michele Caini): https://skypjack.github.io/2019-05-06-ecs-baf-part-3/

// Description
This week I worked on improving the rendering pipeline of our game, including doing better mesh caching and also adding a minimap. After that I wanted to make my deployments easier, so I ported my deployment system to Docker and Docker Compose. Lastly I added some service health monitoring and dashboarding with Prometheus and Grafana. Enjoy!

Faster Renderer, New Minimap, Dockerization, and Service Health Monitoring [Golang MMO Devlog]

⁍ Discord: https://discord.gg/63YeahMKfJ
⁍ Twitter: https://bit.ly/UnitOfTimeOnTwitter
⁍ Play: https://unit.dev/mmo

Since I haven't been keeping up with a devlog on my MMO project, I figured I'd make a video covering approximately the last year of development building an MMO. I'm hoping to make devlog updates more frequently, so stay tuned for that. Also, I didn't really cover it in the video, but I decided to flesh out my OpenSource repo into a full game. So I'll be building the remaining portion of the MMO on a private repo. That said you can still find the point at which I forked here:
⁍ https://github.com/unitoftime/mmo

I'll also be maintaining some general open source libraries on GitHub. You're more than welcome to use them. But most are still a work in progress:
⁍ https://github.com/unitoftime

I spent a year building an MMO from scratch

In this video we explore the synchronization mechanics behind our new login and logout system.

// Socials
⁍ Twitter: https://bit.ly/UnitOfTimeOnTwitter
⁍ Discord: https://discord.gg/63YeahMKfJ

// Code
⁍ MMO Project: https://github.com/unitoftime/mmo
⁍ Play MMO: https://unit.dev/mmo

Handling Player Logins and Logouts [MMO 15]

In this video I spent some time benchmarking my ECS (Entity Component System) framework against the popular Rust ECS, Bevy. We had to do some performance analysis and optimize a few things, but all things considered, we ended up doing pretty well. Specifically, we optimized by doing bounds check elimination (BCE), inlining, and using the recently released Go generics

// Socials
⁍ Twitter: https://bit.ly/UnitOfTimeOnTwitter
⁍ Discord: https://discord.gg/63YeahMKfJ

// Code
⁍ Go Code: https://github.com/unitoftime/ecs/blob/master/bench/main.go
⁍ Rust Code: https://github.com/unitoftime/experiments/blob/master/ecs/rust/src/main.rs

// Good Article
⁍ PlanetScale: https://planetscale.com/blog/generics-can-make-your-go-code-slower


// Errata
1. Calling Monomorphization "The other end of the spectrum" from GC shape stenciling is a bit overblown. Go stencils (ie monomorphizes) its generics based on the GC shape, so there still is some monomorphization happening which can give you nice performance gains for things with different GC shapes. The actual "Other end of the spectrum" is probably something like doing a full dictionary-based boxing and doing no stenciling at all.

2. Why does Bevy Run Slower than Go?
I apologize for not covering this in the video. I think number 1 and 2 are probably the biggest contributors to Bevy running slow.
   a. Bevy has A LOT more features than my ECS, each of those features might contribute to a global optimization for most cases, but in my benchmark contribute to a slowdown. I expect that most people aren't disabling multithreading and the system scheduler and manually executing every game loop.
   b. Bevy has a few different layers at which you can use the ECS, I'm not a bevy expert, so I may have written the code in an abnormal way where bevy ran slower than it usually would have. Very specifically, Bevy seemed to slow down the more  I started adding and deleting components, I'm not sure the limitation there, but I thought it was notable.
   c. Bevy isn't the fastest Rust ECS framework according to this: https://github.com/rust-gamedev/ecs_bench_suite - I learned this actually kind of recently after all my code was written for bevy
   d. Pointed out by laundmo in the comments:
      1. "by default, bevy uses what it calls "Table" storage for components - this is fast to iterate but slow to update. In use cases where you might want to add/remove components a lot, you can switch to SparseSet storage on a per-component basis." - I didn't know this, but it does align with what I saw where Bevy slowed down once I started deleting entities every frame.
      2. "The ECS benchmark [in errata C] you mentioned is outdated by 2 years, and was also recently archived to represent this. Bevy has had multiple optimizations since then. I see you using bevy_ecs 0.7  - in 0.9 there were some decent performance improvements which would be interesting to see."

Golang Physics Performance

This is a quick introduction to Entity Component System Framework design. Specifically focused on how I built and implemented mine. There's a few interesting challenges with cache coherency, entity management, and entity filtering to tackle; so let's take a look!

Articles about building ECS frameworks
⁍ https://ajmmertens.medium.com/building-an-ecs-1-where-are-my-entities-and-components-63d07c7da742
⁍ https://skypjack.github.io/2019-02-14-ecs-baf-part-1/

Other links
⁍ Twitter: https://bit.ly/UnitOfTimeOnTwitter
⁍ Discord: https://discord.gg/63YeahMKfJ
⁍ Code: https://github.com/unitoftime/ecs

Building a fast ECS on top of a slow ECS

I was recently interested in programming languages and had the idea for building a blog which gets generated from experimental code. That way I can write some code and document it - Then compile it into a blog. Previously I've used Hugo to generate blogs from markdown, but it always felt redundant to copy-paste my code from my repositories into my markdown files.

⁍ Twitter: https://bit.ly/UnitOfTimeOnTwitter
⁍ Discord: https://discord.gg/63YeahMKfJ
⁍ Wishlist Spruce: https://bit.ly/SpruceOnSteam
⁍ Code: https://github.com/unitoftime/experiments/tree/master/lit

Thanks for watching. Happy to answer any questions!

Literate(ish) Programming in Go

Today we will talk about how I used Go's channel concurrency primitive to merge data received from the network into our main set of data used by our game loop.

⁍ Series: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_r0j2F4Hkj-Grm05K5lCOd6yaeeSAaY2

This tutorial series is about creating an MMO from (almost) scratch. We will be coding in Golang and we will use libraries where appropriate. I will stay at a fairly high level for most things, but let me know if you want a more intensive study on any individual topic and I'll try to make an episode where possible.

Thanks for watching! Happy to answer any questions!

// Repository: https://github.com/unitoftime/mmo

Networking Concurrency in Go [Making an MMO - E13]

Today we explore the basic concepts behind proxy servers: What they are and why they are used. We will discuss the major implementation details of our proxy as well as tout some of the benefits of hiding our game server behind a custom written reverse proxy. 

⁍ Series: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_r0j2F4Hkj-Grm05K5lCOd6yaeeSAaY2

This tutorial series is about creating an MMO from (almost) scratch. We will be coding in Golang and we will use libraries where appropriate. I will stay at a fairly high level for most things, but let me know if you want a more intensive study on any individual topic and I'll try to make an episode where possible.

Thanks for watching! Happy to answer any questions!

// Repository: https://github.com/unitoftime/mmo
// Read it: https://unit.dev/posts/intro_to_proxy/

Building a Proxy Server for an MMO [Making an MMO - E14]

Today we look at how I coded an AutoTiler for my base builder game Spruce - which is actually not that difficult. AutoTilers select the correct edge tile to render a blobmap of a specific tile type. Most engines like Unity and Godot support features just like this. To do something similar, we generate a bitmask based on tile neighbors and use that to look up the correct tile that we want to render.

⁍ Wishlist Spruce: https://bit.ly/SpruceOnSteam
⁍ Twitter: https://bit.ly/UnitOfTimeOnTwitter

Thanks for watching. Happy to answer any questions!

How to code an AutoTiler (Easier than you think!)

I was curious how the performance of Golang is impacted by using libraries through CGO. Specifically I wanted to see how the performance drops when I use OpenGL in Golang instead of C++. So I wrote a benchmark similar to bunnymark in Go and C++ to compare average frame times.

⁍ Wishlist Spruce: https://bit.ly/SpruceOnSteam
⁍ Twitter: https://bit.ly/UnitOfTimeOnTwitter
⁍ Discord: https://discord.gg/63YeahMKfJ

Thanks for watching. Happy to answer any questions!

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