Cameron Gorrie sastraxi

CUSTOM GAME ENGINES: A Small Study

WARNING: Article moved to separate repo to allow users contributions: https://github.com/raysan5/custom_game_engines

A couple of weeks ago I played (and finished) A Plague Tale, a game by Asobo Studio. I was really captivated by the game, not only by the beautiful graphics but also by the story and the locations in the game. I decided to investigate a bit about the game tech and I was surprised to see it was developed with a custom engine by a relatively small studio. I know there are some companies using custom engines but it's very difficult to find a detailed market study with that kind of information curated and updated. So this article.

Nowadays lots of companies choose engines like [Unreal](https:

Turning PostgreSQL into a queue serving 10,000 jobs per second

RDBMS-based job queues have been criticized recently for being unable to handle heavy loads. And they deserve it, to some extent, because the queries used to safely lock a job have been pretty hairy. SELECT FOR UPDATE followed by an UPDATE works fine at first, but then you add more workers, and each is trying to SELECT FOR UPDATE the same row (and maybe throwing NOWAIT in there, then catching the errors and retrying), and things slow down.

On top of that, they have to actually update the row to mark it as locked, so the rest of your workers are sitting there waiting while one of them propagates its lock to disk (and the disks of however many servers you're replicating to). QueueClassic got some mileage out of the novel idea of randomly picking a row near the front of the queue to lock, but I can't still seem to get more than an an extra few hundred jobs per second out of it under heavy load.

So, many developers have started going straight t

Update: 2023/11/30 Bruce Momjian's take on things: https://momjian.us/main/blogs/pgblog/2023.html#November_22_2023

Given a table...

CREATE TABLE foo (
  id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
  created_at TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE DEFAULT NOW(),
  ...
);

	FROM postgres:11-alpine

	ENV WAL2JSON_COMMIT_ID=7360b1e8ddfaa5e0c033a084241885587056c674

	# Compile the wal2json plugin from sources and install it
	RUN apk --update add --virtual build-dependencies build-base git openssh \
	&& git clone https://github.com/eulerto/wal2json -b master --single-branch \
	&& cd /wal2json \
	&& git checkout $WAL2JSON_COMMIT_ID \
	&& USE_PGXS=1 make && USE_PGXS=1 make install \

	MIT License

	Copyright (c) 2018 Noel Bundick

	Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
	of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
	in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
	to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
	copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
	furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

	#!/bin/bash
	#
	#This script assumes very little other than a fresh Ubuntu install (using the Windows store) on Win10 1709 or newer with WSL installed already
	#In Powershell, run the following to install WSL and Ubuntu
	#
	#Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux
	#Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://aka.ms/wsl-ubuntu-1604 -OutFile ~/Ubuntu.zip -UseBasicParsing
	#Expand-Archive ~/Ubuntu.zip ~/Ubuntu
	#~/Ubuntu/ubuntu.exe
	#

	###
	###
	### UPDATE: For Win 11, I recommend using this tool in place of this script:
	### https://christitus.com/windows-tool/
	### https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil
	### https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UQZ5oQg8XA
	### iwr -useb https://christitus.com/win \| iex
	###
	### OR take a look at
	### https://github.com/HotCakeX/Harden-Windows-Security

	#ifdef GL_ES
	#define LOWP lowp
	#define MED mediump
	#define HIGH highp
	precision mediump float;
	#else
	#define MED
	#define LOWP
	#define HIGH
	#endif