We wanted this demo to be as simple as possible, to run in the browser, end to end, with no downloads or native binaries required. Here's Doom Multiplayer running on top of Cloudflare Workers showcasing this scenario… So, if a developer wants to run their next hit, say a real-time multiplayer game, using nothing but their app and Workers, without any servers or traditional infrastructure, can they? Let’s prove they can. This opened a large door to start implementing real-time, interactive applications that can communicate over persistent data connections, all on top of Workers. Not only that, but we improved Durable Objects to seamlessly interface with WebSocket connections and provide state and storage capabilities. Running Doom is effectively the new “Hello, World” in computing.Ī few weeks ago, we introduced a major feature in our Workers edge computing platform: WebSockets support. Since then, his masterpiece was ported to run on pretty much anything that has a CPU on it, including a pregnancy test and a spectrum analyser. In 1997, John Carmack, still at id Software, open-sourced the original code and presented it as "a useful base to experiment and build on." Little did he know. If you want to read more about this period and how the " Two Johns" changed everything in gaming back in the 90s, I highly recommend you get a copy of the book Masters of Doom.īut Doom has gone beyond the gaming community. It became an instant revolution and sparked both a new game industry and a global community of gamers and Doom fans that lasts up until today. When id Software launched it in 1993, it boasted 3D graphics, spatial navigation, networked multiplayer, and an open format (WAD) to define levels, sprites, and all sorts of game modifications, also known as Doom modding. And we’ve open sourced the code for all of it: Doom running in Wasm, the associated website and the message routing code that runs on the edge using Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects.ĭoom is considered the first popularized FPS (first-person shooter) game of all time. So while you’re enjoying multiplayer Doom running in the browser and coordinated by Durable Objects and Cloudflare Workers, try to keep in mind this new architecture for applications. Doom Multiplayer was the perfect example because it demonstrates the power of WebAssembly to run code in the browser and the power of Durable Objects to provide the backend for multiplayer games with low latency. Games are fun, interactive and tend to stress systems. The edge offers advantages from both worlds: the code is secured and can contain secrets since it runs in a controlled environment and not on the end-user device, the code can be updated quickly since it doesn’t depend on the end-user and the edge is close to end-users meaning low latency and opportunity for high interactivity. But it tends to be far from the end-user which limits interactivity because of latency. You can keep secrets in that code, and modify it at will. On the other hand, code running on a server is quick to update and secure. If the client is actually an IoT device then updates can be even slower or essentially never. And client-side code can be slow to update as it depends on the end-user. But client-side code has security problems: it’s literally in the hands of the end-user and thus can be reverse engineered or modified. Because the code runs close to the end-user it can be highly interactive, there’s almost no latency since it’s literally running on the device. Writing code that runs on a client (such as JavaScript that runs in a browser or a native app on a phone) has advantages. He fatally nerd-sniped me.Īside by John: I nerd-sniped him because I wanted to show how Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects are a new architectural paradigm where, rather than choosing between two places to write code (the client, the browser or app, and the server, perhaps in a cloud provider availability zone), there’s a third way: put code on the edge. A couple of months ago, John Graham-Cumming, our CTO, bumped into me in one of those places and asked: "What if we ported Doom multiplayer to work with our edge network?". There are halls and corridors in Cloudflare engineering, dangerous places for innocent wanderers, filled with wild project ideas, experiments that we should do, and extremely convincing proponents.
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