Comment by BSTRhino
1 day ago
I'm making Easel, a 2D game programming language designed to match how humans, not computers, think about game logic. It also has automatic multiplayer. I've been working on it for 3 years!
Easel feels like a declarative programming language even though it is imperative, because lots of useful game-oriented features are first class. Like behaviours - you just say `on Pointer { ... }` and you have a concurrently-executing coroutine that's lifetime is managed. But you don't think about any of that complexity, you just think of your entity as having a behaviour and go forth and make your game.
It also happens to have automatic multiplayer. Normally with multiplayer you have to worry about doing everything in a "multiplayer safe" way (i.e. be deterministic and only modify the things your side has authority over). My idea was to put all the multiplayer stuff in the programming language itself, underneath all your lines of code. This way, anything you write in that programming language can just be made multiplayer, automatically. So you can just pretend all your players are in one shared world, like a singleplayer game, and the engine does all the multiplayer for you. It was really difficult to make but it makes multiplayer so easy for you now.
Easel is my idea of how games should be made, or at least as close to the idea as I can achieve with 3 years of work, and I would love for more people to try it out.
> you can just pretend all your players are in one shared world, like a singleplayer game, and the engine does all the multiplayer for you
But how does this really work? The website also says it's just baked into the language but there are many different approaches to networking games that have their own pros and cons.
It uses rollback netcode. The inputs are relayed to the other players and executed on all clients, and they end up in the same state because all Easel programs are guaranteed deterministic. To hide latency, the clients simulate forward even before they have received all inputs, and once inputs have been received it rolls back to the point of divergence to correct the prediction error. This works because the prediction is correct most of the time.
To be able to roll back, Easel incrementally snapshots the game state every tick. It only snapshots (and restores) what has changed, which makes it a lot more efficient than most rollback netcode implementations.
It also uses a peer-to-peer relay and adapts the latency asymmetrically, so the player who introduces latency feels their own latency.
I know there are other models and pros and cons, this is the right choice for Easel because I wanted to make the multiplayer fully automatic. One shared world, coded like a singleplayer game. There are certainly games which suit a client/server model better but I think the developer would then need to understand where their code is running and when to do remote procedure calls, and my goal was to make multiplayer so easy that even a teenager on their first day of coding could do it.
That's great stuff! IIRC Factorio takes the same approach but relies on extensive testing to avoid running into desync issues with non-deterministic code. Would be very cool to be able to build games like that without needing to worry about desyncs!
It might be a good idea to highlight some of the limitations to this approach somewhere so users aren't caught off guard later in the development process. For example, it wouldn't be great to build a competitive FPS or MOBA with this because the game state is replicated to all players which is a cheaters dream. The latency characteristics would also not be ideal for games with a larger number of players. I also assume there are no escape hatches for doing any non-deterministic things like I/O so there would be limited to no persistence possible. It won't be an issue for most games but worth highlighting just in case IMO.
This is really cool. Nice project!
I tried doing something much more rudimentary before. Will be following
Oh, thank you!
I would love to hear more about what you were trying to do with your project before. Was it more similar to the declarative coding part, the automatic multiplayer part, or something else? Part of why I'm doing this is to explore the design space of how games should be made and I'm interested to hear what problems, issues, pet peeves, "bugbears" etc that other people think are worth solving.
It's been a while. But I believe what caused me the most headache while trying to build something like this was handling the interactions between different elements. Declaring which objects were affected by "attacks" or could be "player interactive" or "affected by player but not by NPC". Really this boiled down to proper inheritance. But I found myself so deep and tangled a fresh reset would have been better. Then determining if the object itself or an "objective manager" should perform the calculation each cycle.. etc
It was messy. I ended up having NPC, Item, Attack classes and for each a NPC Manager, Item Manager, and Attack Manager to calculate all their interactions and states.
That's why your project seems interesting because it seems to handle the heavy lifting of behaviors and "behind the scenes".
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