SpacetimeDB ThreeJS Support and FREE TIER!

Resources
, ,
2

I see this database pop up on Hacker News from time to time. I think it’s an interesting piece of tech, but I find their insistence on marketing it as a game engine type thing bizarre. There’s no advantage to using it to make games over making any other type of software service.

One comment I think sums it up well: SpacetimeDB v1.0: Multiplayer at the speed of light | Hacker News

”I kept on reading expecting to see motion prediction, multiversion, or similar given the name and focus on games, but no. This is a totally normal database, designed for low latency and with support for WASM stored procedures. You can host your own server or they will rent you one.

Don’t get me wrong, this looks very nice. It looks like a solid building block for persistent worlds in multiplayer games. You’ll just have to do your lag masking netcode yourself.”

3

That’s a fair take — the marketing definitely blurs the line. But I think their “game engine” angle is less about competing with Unity or Unreal and more about emphasizing real-time multiplayer sync. Traditional app databases don’t usually focus on low-latency state replication between clients.

2 Likes
4

How does it compare with GitHub - colyseus/colyseus: ⚔ Multiplayer Framework for Node.js? Seems up the same alley but I haven’t seen any writeups on this.

FWIW I’ve used colyseus as a multiplayer authoritative game server with simulation logic and it works.

5

Note: this is a referral link. That should probably be disclosed in the comment…

1 Like