Flythrough.Space VS Marten

Here's what it looks like now (planet files):

My project was a 3d in-browser escape velocity clone (think Endless Sky.) It ended up with an impressive feature set, mediocre graphics, not nearly enough world, no real game loop, and no players: http://flythrough.space

My mistake was building it totally in secret for most of its life. I worked on it for years focusing on adding features that maybe nobody wanted without validating the product/market fit or generating any buzz. By the time I was "ready" someone had gained way more steam on their own EV remake, even getting the author of Override to endorse it, so the fact that I had a working prototype didn't really matter, the community that I thought would be receptive wasn't interested.

I learned that you need to build something worth playing first, including some kind of game loop, before you try to get people to play it. Turns out noodling around with a hacky prototype isn't something people find exciting even if the whole community is centered around noodling around with mods and hacking. People won't mod a game they don't love in the first place.

Since this project, I've committed to building smaller prototypes and validating concepts before I go all-in on building something polished and content rich, and thought I haven't shipped anything this big since, I have met my personal goals.

Full retrospective: http://blog.eamonnmr.com/2020/08/flythrough-space-retrospect...

The conclusion: http://blog.eamonnmr.com/2020/04/dont-remake-an-old-game/

Here's a real example from a project I worked on in my homebrew ECS framework and later implemented in Godot: a guided missile.

In the ECS project the notion of 'thing that can run into other things and do damage' so totally separate from the notion of 'thing that is driven around by AI.' So adding guidance to an existing projectile wasn't too much of a pain. In the Godot project I'm dealing with networking as well, so the division is between fire-and-forget projectiles (derived from Bullet) which know about hitting things and doing damage, and AI driven Ships with AI or player driven movement which needs to be synced over the Network. In that case I had to copypasta the AI driven movement code into a 'guided' class under Bullet. That said, for almost every other task, Godot's composition first model has been way easier to work with, especially because it lets you test elements in isolation. Here are the two projects if you'd like to compare the code:

Homebrew ECS framework on top of the babylonjs engine: https://github.com/EamonnMR/Flythrough.Space

Godot with networking:

Id recommend trying out MartenDb. It's not really a PostgreSQL ORM, it actually uses Postgres more as a document database via jsonb. But it's excruciatingly easy to use and schema updates are a breeze (and largely automatic)

Check out Marten for a fully fleshed out implementation https://github.com/JasperFx/marten

We are using ExtCore here to make our app modular: https://extcore.net/, and MartenDB for event store (which is surprisingly VERY simple) : https://martendb.io/

I always loved Marten, it is so simple to use and yet powerful. If you are unfamiliar with it, it is a data access library (like an ORM) that is using JSON serialization and LINQ to store and query data from/to Postgres. It basically turns Postgres into document DB. Comparing it to EF, Marten doesn't require migrations since it stores documents.

You're better off using Postgres (has JSON columns.) If you want a more "document" oriented experience, use Marten: https://martendb.io/

For that part, the samples use EventStoreDB (https://www.eventstore.com/), which is the only mature event store I know in Node.js land. Event Sourcing allows using any database as backing storage. I'm co-maintainer of the Marten (https://martendb.io/), which is a .NET library that allows using Postgres as event store and document db.

Then you should check out Marten (https://martendb.io/). Our intention is to remove the boilerplate, we're using Postgres e having the built-in projections.

Not to be confused with the C# document database built on Postgres.

https://martendb.io/