Delta Quadrant: Horizons

From Sergey Mereutsa (posted to fb-devel):

Dear friends!

While it is an offtopic here, but it may be interesting for all, who is in any form involved in Firebird development.

Several years ago, we announced a web-based game, written in Firebird SQL. It was DQ:Empires and a lot of peoples around the world played this game.

Now, I`m pleased to announce next game, in the same game universe, but slightly other – Delta Quadrant: Horizons, a web-based space 4X strategy.

I will not write much details here about the game (someone compared it with online version of Masters of Orion game, but it is not MOO2 clone) – you can read more on game`s site, http://www.dqhorizons.com/ .

Some technical details:

Game development started in FB 2.1 and was implemented as proof of some technologies (AJAX/PHP interaction). This year we decided to port it for social networks (Russian social network Vkontakte and well-known Facebook ports complete, other follow).

We jumped (yes, it was like jump) to FB 2.5, because it allowed us interdatabase connections.

Now we implemented fully scalable architecture with one master database and some slave databases. Almost all logic are in procedures (and triggers), PHP is used to filter user`s input and format SP`s result in XML/JSON, C++ used for game turn processing – because DML does not likes arrays as language structures.

There are 80 tables and 356 procedures in master database (yes, I know, some developers has thousands procedures), slave databases has the same metadata scheme. In the worst (it is best, from other point of view) case we expect 10^9 (billion) of records in the “explored stars table”.

Currently we are using Classic architecture – it is more suitable for development, but we plan to switch on SuperClassic after game release.

I want to say big thanx to Vlad Khorsun and Alex Peshkoff for their patience – hope our private bug reports was complete and not so annoying 🙂

First huge galaxy for Facebook (and for “original” game) is named Firebird and not only contain Firebird logo on the galaxy image – galaxy stars form Firebird logo shape too. Count this as our “Mind the Bird” idea propagation.

Feel free to ask me any technical details about game implementation.

P.S.: Last time I`v announced game, written in Firebird we`v got Brazillian Alliance, which was added (“canonized”) into the game universe as Republic of Borzellia, which is one of the main forces in our another MMO game with working title “DQ: Open Space”, but this another story.

And yes, we need Firebird 3.0 for main server 😉

P.P.S. If you experience problems with IE8 and our Facebook application – just enable cookies for our domain dqhorizons.com.

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Best regards,
Sergey