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firebase

Introduction

Would you want some cloud with your game server?
Cubeia Firebase was initially build for real money gambling and for deployment on dedicated hardware. It makes sense to control your hardware when you're dealing with monetary systems but as gambling focus has shifted the last couple of years towards social gaming cloud based deployments makes much more sense. In this article we'll present Cubeia Poker running on Amazon AWS and our initial load tests and evaluation.

Today we release Firebase 1.9.0-CE (and of course also EE for our enterprise customers). It's been 6 months since 1.8.0 and we've been using 1.9 internally for approximately 2 months now, including within a very active development project. This release can be described in two acronyms: JPA and JNDI. By adding JNDI within the server and removing JPA we've made it significantly easier to actually use JPA. The king is dead! Long live the king!

In a series of posts we’ll do “Firebase From Scratch”, an introduction to Firebase and its concepts and ideas. Hopefully, reading this series will give you a firm grasp of what Firebase is and what it can do.

Having talked a bit about the server side game the last three episodes, let's have a look at services. These are extensions to Firebase you can write yourself to provide cross-game functionality and common behavior.

When a game network attaches external integrations, such as remote wallets, asynchronous communications becomes important. This can be any kind of integration, but in this blog post we'll assume it's a wallet we're talking with. So, what's our problem?

  • If the network has several operators no operator must block players from another operator. If the wallet operation is synchronous, one call to an integration may lock the entire table. It is more acceptable if there is only one operator, but when there's several, we must make sure no-one is penalized by another players operator.
  • Similarly, we may have other integrations that takes time even for a single operator and don't want to block game play during it's operation. This might include interactions with national gambling authorities, etc.
So here' a wallet example: A player needs to buy in after having lost all money at the table. The game server asks the player if he wants to buy in and if the player accepts the buy in he's placed in a "buy-in in progress" state while the game server sorts out the actual money transfer. Note that the game play may well start at the table with the player in a sit-out state if the buy-in takes a long time.
  1. Send buy-in information to player
  2. On buy-in request from player, set player state to "buy-in in progress"
  3. Hand-off buy-in operation from the game to a wallet service
  4. When buy in is complete, wallet service notifies game
  5. Game sets player as "in game" and notifies the same
Easy, huh? Now let's do some coding. A word of warning though, I'll write it down off the cuff so you'd better off treating the following as pseudo code, but it should give you an idea on how it's done.

TicTacToe is one of the classic examples when it comes to multiplayer games. The rules and interactions are simple enough to make it a good example. We have now amassed a few examples. A few

In a series of posts we’ll do “Firebase From Scratch”, an introduction to Firebase and its concepts and ideas. Hopefully, reading this series will give you a firm grasp of what Firebase is and what it can do.

Now let's talk a bit more about handling actions in a server game. Why is the actions binary data as opposed to objects? Who do you do scheduling? Can you send actions internally between games, tournaments, services etc? Read on for some answers. The Table Instance When an action comes in to either of the "handle data action" or "handle object action", you are given two objects, the action itself and a table. It is important to re-iterate at this point that your server Game is a collection of objects that collaborate: the game instance and it's processors, the activator and all currently existing tables.

You should never keep references to table instances in your game or activator.

The above rule is because Firebase is build to transparently scale across multiple servers: Firebase needs to be able to "move tables" between different servers and will do so to make sure there's no data loss even if servers are crashing.

Finally, after 6 months of active development, three release candidates and untold liters of developer blood and sweat: Firebase 1.8.0-CE is now released! This release brings HTML5 support in the form of WebSockets and Comet right into the Firebase server. The

In a series of posts we’ll do “Firebase From Scratch”, an introduction to Firebase and its concepts and ideas. Hopefully, reading this series will give you a firm grasp of what Firebase is and what it can do.

In the last section we had a look at the game server code and its different components and we learned that "Tables" are the areas around which a number of players join and participate in games. Now we'll look at the creation of tables, which is done via a game "Activator".