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Comment by Thaxll | Hacker News Reader

Erlang performance would be a big problem. It's subpar compared to C++ by an order of magnitude.

Would an MMO backend be CPU bound though? I feel the use case of having a large numbers of active connections with the very distributed nature of passing events around between them all would be perfect for Erlang/OTP. Anything CPU intensive (like dungeon generation or similar) could be offloaded to another service if needed.

You want low latency action, and for that you need one CPU with all cores talking to all the memory without locking. Erlang can't do that, and neither can any other language; except C (Arrays of 64 byte Structures) and Java (Concurrency complete rewrite of the JVM in 1.5 that was adopted and failed for C++11 because you need a VM + GC for that model to be meaningful).

Does it really need to be low latency? It's not an FPS - so I don't think high tick rate is important. I'd rather have a wider synchronized global state and acceptable server side latency (<500ms) than instant server updates. The client can interpolate everything.

Then you are making a slideshow, not a game.

The whole point of games is real-time action.

It does not need to be violent, but it needs physics that give you the feeling of being there.

Multiplayer > VR

Lots of mmos have low tick rates. I believe Eve Online is once per second. Originally WoW was like 2.5/s. You don’t need high tick rates in MMOs (but you certainly have to design the game systems around expected server tick rate).

depends on the kind of game you are making. People made MMOs in the year 2000 when CPUs themselves were an order of magnitude slower.

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