Codename: SpaceGame II

Codename_SpaceGame_II_Demo.mov

About

Codename: SpaceGame II is a labour of love I have been developing over the past few years. What started out as a dream to pay homage to the telnet based MUDs of the early 1980s internet, has steadily grown into a fantastic world of its own. Through several iterations and countless hours, Codename: SpaceGame II has grown from an in-terminal ray-marcher using ncurses, to an online multiplayer game accessible through SSH.

Along the way I've learned how to write multi-processed and multi-threaded server code, SPOT server architecture netcode so every client stays in sync with each other, the world around them, and the server, and architecture specific SIMD optimization intrinsics for the physics and rendering backend. The whole project, as the vehicle on which I've accelerated my interest in graphics and networking after enjoying a few graduate courses in college, is written from the ground up utilizing as few libraries as possible. Codename: SpaceGame II is what happens when you build a universe from scratch.

Over the course of the project's development I've rewritten many libraries, implemented others, and optimized yet more. The original ncurses implementation was rewritten from scratch into a streamlined library I call nblessings which allows for faster frame-rate blitting. I've written a highly optimized Quaternion implementation of rotation which only takes 28 SIMD operations to complete, an intense chunk caching algorithm built from self-balancing aa-trees and unordered lists, and a client dispatcher with asynchronous event handling. As it stands, libssh is the ONLY third-party library in the whole project.

The graphics pipeline is based around a ray marcher, which includes occlusive shadows, ambient and point lighting, and color blending and matching based off oklab; Björn Ottosson's numerically stable interpretation of the recent CAM16-UCS and CIELUV descriptions of color theory, combining speed and fidelity to the real world. The ray marcher is multithreaded, processing tasks from a pool of yet-to-be rendered pixels, which lets the CPU operate on all cores at the same time, drastically speeding up rendering times per frame.

Feature Roadmap:

• Migrated to changelog.md

Running your own SpaceGame Server

Download:

All binary downloads still require keys to be installed. keygen.sh (as bash)

• x86_64 based linux (and most likely posix) users can download and run binaries from build artifacts in this github repository.
• ARMv8 NEON binaries are not currently available. Please build from source.

Supported Platforms

• ARMv8 with NEON
• x86_64 with SSE4.2

Building:

There are many build targets available with make.

• make: With no args, make creates a medium performance build without cleaning.
• all: Cleans the directory and rebuilds medium performance.
• optimized: Builds at optimization level 3, and with fast-math.
• debug: Builds with debug flags enabled, which add some more server-side print statements. Also enables -g3 GNU debug headers.
• clean: removes all object files.
• help: prints all targets

Dependencies:

• libssh
  • available through apt as libssh-dev and I'm sure practically every package manager has an option too.

Running

• Populate server keys by running keygen.sh (as bash) !!Required On First Run!!

• Run server: ./spaceGame [optional IPv4 bindaddr]

• Run client: ssh [username]@[127.0.0.1 or bindaddr supplied to server] -p 2222

  • password can be set for any new user in the user database at their first login