Elixir for Real-Time Strategy Games in Space

Julian Doherty, a lead developer with 20 years of experience, delves into the complexities of developing a real-time space battle multiplayer game that factors in the distances between players who could be millions of miles apart, where the speed of light affects the timing of gameplay events. He draws inspiration from hard science fiction, like 'The Expanse' and 'Dread Empire's Fall', where space combat resembles high latency asynchronous chess rather than the fast-paced battles seen in Star Wars. Julian addresses the challenges of designing such a game using Elixir and the Entity Component System (ECS) pattern to deal with the delayed messaging caused by light-speed travel across a virtual solar system. He also explains the architectural considerations required to manage real-time updates and message passing using Elixir constructs such as GenServer, event buses, and data structures like quadtrees and octrees to efficiently track space-game entities and events in real-time.