Choosing Ruby on Rails as platform for an browser based online game

Question

I have some (I think) really great ideas for an online strategy game similar to Travian. There's some content that I haven't yet figured out and some other challenges that I don't know of yet.

This is quite a big project and perhaps too heavy for one person that isn't a skilled web developer (yet). I'd still like to give it a shot, but I'm having trouble choosing a platform. The world "scales" has been thrown around a lot lately and I've seen Ruby on Rails being bashed because it doesn't scale well, so I've come here to get some answers.

I like Ruby on Rails, both Ruby and Rails. I'm certainly no expert at it but I love working with it. I have also worked with Python + Django before and also with PHP (which I am not fond of.)

Ideally the game would have, let's say, 7000 players per server, presumably a lot of data to be processed per second. Would RoR still be a viable platform?

I'm sorry if this question is vague, I guess I'm looking for a "RoR is fine, go at it!" kind of answer. Anything you might want to add is fine.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I think Ruby on Rails is a good choice for what you need. Actually, we recently created a platform for an online gaming tournament, where players and their gaming bots were playing a logic game.

We used Ruby on Rails and Sidekiq on the backend, ReactJS and WebSocket on the frontend. And it worked well for a quite massive number of players. Here is the tutorial based on what we learnt while building it: How to Write a Game Engine Using Ruby on Rails

Answer 2

This is a bit of an impossible question to answer because in order to know whether rails is suitable for what you want to do we would need to a lot more about what you are trying to do. The best advice I can give in the absence of information is for you to check out the railslab scaling videos in order to work it out for yourself.

Answer 3

build it in Rails, host it on Heroku.com - job done. Almost infinite scaling that you don't have to worry about how it works (it just does) and it hosts a lot of highly trafficked Facebook apps so can more than handle it.

Answer 4

So if I were you, I would be looking into non-blocking servers like node.js, just because they are MUCH more suited to keeping many connections open for long periods of time, which is what games need to do, compared to traditional web servers.

That being said

There are 3 main things to worry about when you are scaling a web app; memory, execution speed, and io (hd and network) in that order.

For memory, things are much better then they used to be. Phusion Passenger uses copy on write to fork its workers, so the rails environment will get shared among all the workers on a given slice, which is pretty significant. There have also been huge improvements to the way ruby manages memory compared to "the dark times", if you are using 1.8.7 then you want to be using the patches that make up Ruby Enterprise Edition (the difference is like night and day). 1.9.x was pretty much a total rewrite of the runtime, so if you are using that the memory issues ruby had have already been addressed.

For execution speed, 1.8.7 is typically "fast enough" (at least after tuning garbage collection settings). 1.9.2 is actually around the same speed as python, which puts it on the faster side of interpreted languages. How important this point is completely depends on the nature of your application.

Last point is IO, which isn't really a concern of rails, but more your persistence strategy. Rubyists tend to love new things, so you will find first class support for things like redis and mongodb, with loads of people talking about using them and their wins/gotchas. I would look into mongo if I were you and see if the durability trade-offs are acceptable.

I was in java/.net before going to rails, and at the end of the day you are going to pay more for infrastructure, but the amount will be completely dwarfed by what you save in development time.

Answer 5

As you said yourself, you already have the answer and you are only looking for encouraging words:). I am not RoR expert myself, but I don't think scalability is still such a great issue on this platform. I would advice you to do an architecture spike (XP terminology). Write a test with 7000 clients and method which would perform similar operations to what you intend to create. For example you might load files, render views or even just wait... The point is to test only the thing you are worried about. Good luck!