Running a million-board chess MMO in a single process · eieio.games

The article details the technical architecture and challenges of creating 'One Million Chessboards,' a real-time chess MMO that successfully managed over 150,000 players and 15,000,000 moves within a single Go process. It covers strategies for minimizing bandwidth using protobufs and zstd, implementing optimistic UI with rollback netcode to achieve 0ms latency, and managing game state with a single mutex and dense arrays. The author also reflects on gameplay design, the importance of conveying a sense of scale in multiplayer games, and the personal growth derived from the project's development.