The original idea was to experiment with Zig + Raylib, eventually we wrote a small server in Erlang as well. We started by first interacting with Erlang via its C bindings, but this eventually led to some of us to prototyping our own tooling to better integrate Zig types with Erlang, we called such tool "zerl" as its avaliable here https://github.com/dont-rely-on-nulls/zerl.
Most of the developers are NixOS users, so the tooling heavily relies on Nix as well, including a Postgres running our devshell as well.
I can't give feedback on the code/technology, but on the writing on the lore section, I would try to simplify the writing. For instance the following:
> The reverberations of the trumpet stirred the knights from their deep repose, igniting a tumultuous awakening. With swords unsheathed and hearts ablaze, they clashed in a thunderous symphony of war, each seeking to claim dominance over the waking realm.
Feels too ornate (purple prose) and could be more directly put as:
> The trumpet’s call jolted the knights from their rest. Swords drawn and hearts alight, they clashed in a fierce battle, each striving for dominance.
I'm not an author or anything, but a little bit of copy writing could help - although this might just be me as it's probably a matter of personal taste!
I've thought about this before when I revisited fantasy after years of being in the CS domain which helped me abhor ornate writing. I definitely think there is such thing as TOO ornate but dead-simple language also feels bad. It feels wrong to just say its an exception with fantasy - simplicity is good because it conveys the same thing more clearly and with less effort. I would think that transcends all domains. Still not sure how I feel about this. I guess there is a baseline non-styled language that is all about communicating raw info and then there is style that can be applied to writing which makes it feel more natural in different domains.
Having said all this, I actually do like your example more.
Although not-ornate doesn't necessarily mean dead-simple or bad. For instance compare the following:
> The reverberations of the trumpet stirred the knights from their deep repose, igniting a tumultuous awakening.
With a very similar sentence from Tolkein:
> At that moment, among the trees nearby, a horn rang out. It rent the night like fire on a hill-top. Awake! Fear! Fire! Foes! Awake!
This is much less ornate, with simpler language, yet easier to parse and the image is much more vivid.
In addition, each one must be described in detail, including a potted life story of the blacksmith that created it; when, why, and for whom; metallurgical observations; history of actual use; any supernatural blessings whether apocryphal or actual; the litany of families that have retained it as an heirloom & their subsequent social or political fates; details of any inscription or filigree; and a nickname. This remains true for both the swords and the trumpet. Additional remarks concerning a scabbard or case are optional but highly regarded.
How do you feel about devenv vs stock Nix? How are you getting devenv to work, as I don't see a devenv.nix file. I'm still a Nix beginner and would like to find ways of integrating it more into my development and improving my current techniques.[0]
It's great if you like local-first development experience.
I now see that you're using devenv from within your flake.nix, which I didn't realize you could do.[0] Neat!
I'm going to give that a spin in my projects, as my current solution for pinning versions of Go, Zig, etc. is to use nixhub to look up which commit of nixpkgs corresponds to which version of Go (e.g., Go 1.23.2 is nixpkgs version 4ae2e647537bcdbb82265469442713d066675275). That's obviously a pain to look up and performs poorly, so I'm curious to see how devenv goes.
Thanks for sharing the source!
[0] https://github.com/Dr-Nekoma/lyceum/blob/1b0acf2d4bf295135bb...
Edit: currently with the game running at 60fps, there is no bottleneck from the server side. And we call it every 16ms! I should also mention that Erlang's choice has a learning purpose; we want to try to use the game as a way to learn more about OTP and the BEAM.
Hot loading is pretty nice too.
Maybe you could simulate different parts of the game world on different physical servers.
I think this is something like what the Very Large MMOs do, but with Erlang it might be easier.
I'm curious about Erlang server, do you see any advantage or features that Erlang provides, compared to for example if the server was running in Python via multiple instances?
Given the experience so far, it seems that using Erlang was the correct choice, not only because of the above, but also because Erlang made the server implementation way easier than we thought.
In my experience the issues with Erlang come with working with data structures, records are not flexible and there is not much one can do to abstract the boilerplate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejYcWRERetM&t=2758s
Here's what the game consists rn
You can also check it out a little demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejYcWRERetM&t=2758s
What does "supercharged" mean here? I'd guess raylib simply does all the rendering and input handling, what is it "supercharging" here?
