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Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

> Deploying LiveView close to users is like deploying your game server closes to users – we have real, actual running code for that user so we can do all kinds of interesting things being near to them.

Then why do you start running forward instantly when you press “W” in counterstrike or quake? Why not just deploy servers closer to users?

Gamedev and webdev are more closely related than they seem. Now that webdev is getting closer, it might be good to take advantage of gamedev’s prior art in this domain.

There’s a reason us gamedevs go through the trouble. That pesky speed of light isn’t instant. Pressing “w” (or tapping a button) isn’t instant either, but it may as well be.

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> Then why do you start running forward instantly when you press “W” in counterstrike or quake? Why not just deploy servers closer to users?

You do both? Game client handles movements and writes game state changes to a server, which should be close to the user to reduce the possibility for invalid state behaviors? You really haven't seen online games that deploy servers all over the world to reduce latency for their users? What?

Both web apps and games do optimistic server writes. Both web apps and games have to accommodate a failed write. Both web apps and games handle local state and remote state differently.

I read his post as a criticism of how little optimistic updating is done in web apps, and how bad the user story is. Why can't it be easy to build every app as a collaborative editing tool without writing your own OT or CRDT?

Because an occasional glitch when the client & server sync back up is acceptable in a game. Finding out that my order didn't actually go through is much worse. Especially since click button, see success, and close browser is an relatively common use case.

That's a deliberate UI choice, though, and it doesn't always make sense in non-transactional workflows. It's easy to wait for Google Docs to say "Saved to Drive", and going to a new page to save a document would be really disruptive to your workflow, for example.

Consider these two scenarios.

1. SPA with asynchronous server communication. A button switches to a spinner the moment you click it, and spins until the update is safe at the server. Error messages can show up near the button, or in a toast.

2. LiveView where updates go via the server. The button shows no change (after recovering from submit "bounce" animation) until a response from the server has come back to you. To do anything better, you need to write it yourself, and now you're back in SPA world again.

There's a reason textarea input isn't sent to a server with the server updating the visible contents! Same thing applies to all aspects of the UX.

EDIT: https://dockyard.com/blogs/optimizing-user-experience-with-l... talks about this. That'll handle things like buttons being disabled while a request is in flight, but it won't e.g. immediately add new TODO items to the classic TODO list example.

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