Doom Ported to SQL: The Classic Shooter Now Runs Entirely Inside a Database
We ported the original Doom to SQL

CedarDB's SQLDoom runs the original 1993 Doom's game logic and renderer as SQL queries inside a database. Python only handles input, timing, and display. The game loop hits the original 35 FPS, and the renderer produces full 320x200 frames at up to 60 Hz. Deathmatch multiplayer works. The game logic is about 5,900 lines of SQL, less than the original C source. You can play it now on EU or US servers.
It was important to me to actually port Doom, not only render frames that vaguely look like it.
- bob1029
> I was surprised how easy it is to express pretty complicated game logic in SQL. The game logic is just ~5900 lines of SQL.
I still think HN is taking major naps on the capabilities of contemporary SQL.
There are businesses so complicated that maintaining procedural code over the domain is largely infeasible. Implementing business rules in SQL can decompose the problem in ways that allow for a lot more people to interact with it at the same time.
When I was working in semiconductor manufacturing, we relied very heavily on stored procedures and SQL to operate the factory. Very little operational decision logic existed in code. We had hundreds of users who were inspecting and proposing changes to the same set of procedures. Testing this stuff was trivial because we replicated the prod DB every morning and experimented against live data directly. There was no gap between the information of the business and its logic. Most shops are not ran this way. They treat the database like some CRUD retrieval engine instead of the nexus of both the data and logic.
When people advocate for spending big piles of money with Microsoft, Oracle and IBM, they are generally going for something like the above. They want literally one system the business operates inside of. Spreading a solution across 10+ vendors and tools when you could do with one is borderline negligence depending on your role in the organization.
- soltanov
Less lines of code than vanilla C while abusing query planning as a state machine is peak engineering malpractice. I love it.
- snarfy
This reminds me of LINQ raytracer
https://github.com/lukehoban/LINQ-raytracer
It even uses a ycombinator :D
- goosethe
MY PEOPLE!
https://github.com/seanwevans/pg_shell
https://github.com/seanwevans/pg_gpt2
- noduerme
The game state being a SQL table just kinda triggered a memory of a year of optimization for me. One thing I'm still unsure of being a good decision or a bad one, when I wrote my casino in 2010, was having every remote call update game states on SQL tables that were used as the source of truth. With multiple players you can imagine that there would sometimes be issues. Some of the deadlock problems early on were horrific; scaling was a nightmare. But everything was atomic. No risk of lost data beyond one turn not reaching the server or deadlocking, nothing like a huge nodejs process choking on everyone's calls at the same time, or losing its memory. You always had state.
Looking back it seems like not a terrible design pattern for multiplayer turn-based games, if you can work out the kinks. Atomicity guarantees at least that there is a consistent state that won't get lost. Doing that read/write loop for an action game? Pure folly, but it's pretty funny to me.