symbiants VS TablaM

I've experienced a lot of these concerns while building https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants

I have a simple question that maybe someone smarter than me can answer confidently:

If I want to build something akin to Dwarf Fortress (in terms of simulation complexity) as a browser-first experience - what stack should I choose?

Originally, I prototyped something out using React, PixiJS, and ReactPixi (https://github.com/MeoMix/antfarm). The two main issues I ran into were the performance of React's reconciler processing tens of thousands of entities when most weren't changing (despite heavy memoization) and GC lurching due to excess object allocations. My takeaway was that if I wanted to continue writing in JS/TS that I would need to write non-idiomatic code to avoid excess allocations and abandon React. This approach would result in me effectively creating my own engine to manage state.

I decided to not go that direction. I chose Rust because no GC is a language feature (especially good since GCs in WASM are heavy) and I chose Bevy because it seemed like a fairly structured way to mutate a large amount of code.

Progress has been slow for a lot of the reasons listed in this article. I've written a lot of this off to WASM being a new frontier for game dev and rationalized it by noting there's not a lot of complex simulation games running in browser (that I'm aware of). It's not clear to me if that's actually true, though.

I'm (slowly) building an ~idle game with a twist! Here's the code: https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants

The idea is you're given a simulation of an ant colony that grows autonomously 24/7. You define a window of time each day in which you're allowed to make adjustments to the colony's strategy to help them live more optimally. This is paired with mental health exercises like breathwork and journaling.

The intent is to get people being more consistent with self-care by being motivated to care for a digital pet, but to not make it such an involved endeavor as to be time consuming like a traditional game.

I'm going to pair with some chill lo-fi music so you can hang out and watch your ants do their thing when you need a moment to feel less frazzled while at your desk job :)

Still a long long ways to go before I have anything really tangible and useful, but feel free to follow along with the code or ask questions!

What's the performance of this like? It seems really appealing. I would love to be able to use it to debug https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants because I use RNG heavily to add variance to the world and that, combined with indeterminate execution order of systems, can really leave me scratching my head sometimes.

However, I'm building using a tilemap that's 144x144. So I've got ~21000 entities to log. It seems impractical to snapshot the world every tick, but maybe if it were able to snapshot deltas or something?

Love this book! I wrote Adrian after reading it and asked for permission to build a game inspired by it and received his blessing (https://i.imgur.com/JWwNMR4.png) :)

(slight spoilers, FYI)

https://ant.care/ https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants It's my first game, so it's going pretty slowly, but the goal is to have the player fill the role of the Eliza/Kern hybrid. You send commands to your pet ant colony once-per-day when orbiting the planet gives you line-of-sight. The act of caring for the pet gives you a renewed sense of purpose and a reason to care for yourself and is a mechanism for helping undue to the insanity.

I'm still trying to figure out exactly what the game mechanics will look like (if you have suggestions, I'm all ears!), but I took a stab at some creative writing to build up the plot a bit more:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/17ACH1XLCn7hkKz2dhuL1c_nx...

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wET9mWaYae_GMqbm8n37UoNF...

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Regarding the interview, I would love to know more about his process for deciding which aspects of an animal's ecology he's going to represent in his fiction. Tynan Sylvester (creator of RimWorld, a popular video game) wrote this article called The Simulation Dream, https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/the-simulation-dream, and I think about it a lottt. One concept Tynan stresses for creating a rich and engaging story is to "Choose the minimum representation that supports the kinds of stories you want to generate." I would love to know why Adrian chose to give ants/spiders/(octopi..) the behaviors they have throughout his series and, if he considered other behaviors that he ultimately omitted, what his thought process was for ruling those other behaviors out.

My grid right now is 144x144, so about 20,000 tiles. Things were working OK in iOS Safari when just using colors to draw the tiles, but the browser started crashing when I tried upgrading to image sprites.

Turns out the trick is to not submit each individual tile to the GPU. You have to roll them up into larger, chunked meshes and submit those meshes to lessen the impact.

I'm sure this is game dev 101, but I've never been close enough to the GPU to have to actually care about this sort of stuff.

I wasn't trying to imply that I was making an AAA game. Just that, from the outside, it seemed like the difficulty would be in designing game mechanics, making something actually fun, marketing, etc., but in reality there's an ever-steepening technical learning curve when you want to deliver nicer looking stuff. When I look at how many days I've spent working on my game, and how terrible it looks, and then I look at something like Cyberpunk 2077... I struggle to conceive how we as humans were able to create those levels of graphics in a timeframe that allows for the game to be profitable.

https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants btw. Feel free to browse the code (or come volunteer! I've got a few other HNers tinkering alongside me these days)

I cannot recommend immediate mode GUI programming based on the limitations I've experienced working with egui.

egui does not support putting two widgets in the center of the screen: https://github.com/emilk/egui/issues/3211

It's really easy to get started with immediate mode, it's really easy to bust out some UI, but the second you start trying to involve dynamically resized context and responsive layouts -- abandon all hope. The fact it has to calculate everything in a single pass makes these things hard/impossible.

... that said, I'm still using it for https://ant.care/ (https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants) because it's the best thing I've found. I'm crossing my fingers that Bevy's UI story (or Kayak https://github.com/StarArawn/kayak_ui) become significantly more fleshed out sooner rather than later. Bevy 0.13 should have lots more in this area though (https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/discussions/9538)

https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants Here's my open source game written in Rust and compiled to WASM if you want more reading material :) It uses Bevy not SDL2, though.

I'm working on myself through my work, if that counts?

I'm a staff-level SWE. I took the last year off of paid employment because I felt anxious and stressed even though everything was, objectively, fine. I had some poor health habits that I was staunchly ignoring and a project I was deeply vested in at my job was ripped out from under me. The meaning I ascribed to that project was giving my life purpose and, with that suddenly missing, and with my health in less than ideal shape, my outlook on the world became dismal.

I took the year off because I wanted to try and rediscover that curiosity you mentioned having lost. I used to LOVE programming. I loved feeling like a techno-wizard making pixels bend to my will. What happened? Why did I now feel anxious and uncomfortable staring at a screen while trying to think critically? I think I got a little too lost in the sauce of the startup world and it became clear that it would take some "me time" to rebalance.

So, from some perspectives, I've been doing nothing for a while. No significant other, no money-making job, not travelling the world or living life to the fullest... but having a project that feels meaningful to me, whose existence is moderately under my control, and that I have sufficient time and energy to engage with -- that's giving me most of what I felt was missing. Well, that and dropping a bunch of widely understood bad habits and picking up some better ones.

I want to see myself as a more consistent and reliable person. In my 20s, I had infinite energy. In my 30s, I'm finding that's only true if I keep myself away from alcohol and drugs, exercise constantly, connect with people, and, most importantly, be mindful of my physical and emotional state. If I start slipping into a rut, and don't notice it and nip it in the butt, suddenly it can take over my whole demeanor and disrupt a lot of good things I had going. A couple of days of bad sleep, coupled with a desire to keep pushing forward, can cause me to regress into drinking a bunch of caffeine. The caffeine will mess with my anxiety and mood and I'll be more tempted by unhealthy food and marijuana. These decisions start to affect my energy and makes it more challenging to avoid caffeine... and suddenly I'm in a destructive cycle where I have less energy each day and hide from myself. All these issues were present in my 20s, but they never really seemed to be a hindrance. I could just roll with the punches and remain proud of my accomplishments. Now, in my mid-thirties, I find myself frustrated (yet a little excited) to try and figure out how to keep myself running like a well-oiled machine. I want to remain proud of my consistent growth into my later years and it's going to require getting better at working with myself.

That said, I know me. I don't do well without a project that I can see myself in. It's what makes getting up in the morning worthwhile. I think it has to do with having an avoidant/dismissive emotional attachment style, or something to that effect. So, if someone were to ask me if I'm working on nothing then I guess I would always want to confidently say, "No. I am working on something, but at my own pace and with poorly-defined goals."

So, in an effort to work on myself, I've given myself a project whose goal is to help me, and others, be more consistent and present. I must admit I've taken the most circuitous route possible to achieving this effect as I'm ostensibly creating a digital ant farm which functions as a mental health companion (https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants). The goal is to create a pet whose growth fluctuates with its owners' consistency. I want to see my ant colony thrive if I've consistently been checking in on myself. When I am feeling good, I want to see my ants take on new challenges, expand their territory, stress themselves out trying to maintain their growth, build habituated pathways to foods in an attempt to scale. And then, when I invariably go through an emotional downturn, I want to see my ants yield some of their land back to the fog-of-war, hunker down and weather the storm of inconsistent check-ins and less good habits undermining my personal energy. And then, when I've sated my desire for self-destruction and re-commit to being dedicated to my goals, I want to see my ants rediscover forgotten pathways, regain their ground quickly, and act as a reminder that my emotional downturns don't invalidate all the growth I'd done prior. I want to have this pseudo-living creature that serves as a visual proxy for how well I feel I'm doing. I want this because the job to be done gives me purpose in my day-to-day and because the end result will help keep me aware of how I'm doing, how I was doing, and will provide unique motivation to show up, curious about what my ants have been up to, day after day.

If anyone feels similarly and could see themselves finding purpose through this effort - feel free to reach out. I would be happy to talk to you and help you find a home in the project. There's Discord and email in my bio. It's my first game, the scope is way too large, the code I've written is bad, and I have no strategy for monetization. You'll very likely become a worse Rust developer by associating with me :) ... but I know I want to create something that helps motivate people to continue showing up for themselves and I'm confident there are others out there who either feel similarly, or feel lost and could use help finding themselves with the right project.

I've written a lot! Sorry for the meandering thoughts and the weird upsell of a project in a thread about working on nothing... but it all seemed relevant to me while the thoughts were flowing. Cheers :)

SEEKING VOLUNTEERS

Project Name: Symbiants

Website: https://ant.care/

GitHub: https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants

Languages: Rust (Bevy), WebGPU, WASM, JS

Project Description:

Symbiants is a digital ant farm with a mental health twist. The goal is to make a cute, real-time ant colony sim (think SimAnt + Tamagotchi), get players to form a daily routine around feeding and caring for their ants, and incorporate basic mental health activities (guided breathing, positivity journaling, etc.) into the gameplay.

The player gets a comfy, cozy, digital environment with a pet that grows in real-time. Each morning, they check on their ants as they get online, do a quick self-check-in, and see visual reminders of their consistency and its effects on their pet's growth.

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This is my first attempt at building a video game. It's been a lot of fun so far, but, unsurprisingly, is a lot of work. I had some cash saved up and took the last year off of work. In this time, I built a prototype in React, then taught myself Rust/Bevy, and began chipping away at this project. I've made some progress, but I don't feel this vision is anywhere near complete. I would love to have more people to work with, discuss ideas, and learn the finer points of Rust/WebGPU development.

To me, this is an especially important project because I see a lot of people who love to be terminally online, work from home, play video games to zone out after work, and sometimes fall into a rut where days fly by without sufficient self-care. How to reach those people? It can be difficult to broach the subject as mental health is fairly taboo. I am curious to see if a video game can be an effective means of starting a conversation.

Trying to use technology to get people to spend some time meditating/breathing is fun :) I especially the gong.

My WIP attempt at achieving something similar: https://ant.care/

There's a button "breathe for food" that'll trigger a similar effect as your website. The difference is that the user is given a digital reward ("food") which they use to feed their digital ant colony.

I'm now trying to add intelligent behaviors to the ant colony in an attempt to make it seem alive and compelling enough for users to repeatedly engage with the breathwork exercises.

Good luck with your project! :)

> Very curious if anyone knows how to pull this off.

I work in this space (small/mid-size).

The good news is that there are several "obvious" ways to pull this off because an ERP is the culmination of everything a company needs and does. So almost anything you can imagine on the software is part of it.

The bad news, and the reason everyone wants a solution, is that is truly a big space, and then you need E.V.E.R.Y.T.H.I.N.G.

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My take is to start from the bottom, and build a much better version of Access/FoxPro (https://tablam.org).

Any medium/big ERP end being a specialized computing platform that needs:

- A programming language

- A database engine

- An orchestration engine

- ELT engine

- Auth

- UI/Report builders

And to be clear: NONE of the "programming language", "database engine", etc are a good fit today.

NONE.

This is the big thing, This is the reason (from a tech POW only) that most attempts fail.

This is the secret of why Cobol rule(d): Is all of this! but is too old! (also, this is why SQL still is best: Is almost this).

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So, to pull this off, you need a team that knows what is "missing" from our current tools, makes a well-integrated package, and adds a "user-friendly" interface in a way that is palatable for the kind of user that uses excel (powerfully).

Is not that impossible. FoxPro was the best example of this kind of integrated solution.

P.D: This is my life's dream, to make this truth!

SEEKING VOLUNTEERS: TablaM relational language (https://tablam.org)

TablaM is an in-progress programming language to provide a more ergonomic experience for building data-oriented applications.

This means that where most languages are focused on low-level details or engineering at large, TablaM is tailored with some small & big design decisions to make it enjoyable to write applications for e-commerce, finance, ERPs, and similar.

Cool things:

- TablaM marry the array + relational models. It means we should get very little need for manual loops and all the ops are vectorized.

Yeah, I worked on https://tablam.org and https://spacetimedb.com.

It becomes pretty clear that `order` is a significant property to make useful (and performant!) programs. "Duplicates" is also required to make usefull programs.

One nonobvious reason for this: You wanna report that a `customer` has a duplicated key `1`. If you CAN'T model `[(customer.id = 1), (customer.id = 1)]` then you can't report errors! And `erroneous` data is VITAL to make useful programs because then the only possibility is "perfect" data, and that is not possible!

Another reason is that we want to `count` duplicates, to see `duplicates`, and other NON-obvious at first: "What is a duplicate?". Get fun with floats, Unicode, combining case and non-case sensitive input... and is obvious that for useful programs IS REQUIRED to support bags in an extended version of the relational model.

And yet...

IS very important to remember about `set semantics` and try to adhere to it when makes sense. Your query planner will like it. You "valid" constraints like it. And `unique index` like it. And so on...

Finally, for app development, I will "suggest" everyone use my lang https://tablam.org!

This is moe interesting than it looks, probably because the best part (IMHO) is about the type system, that is what enables the other ideas.

> In Julia, types are first-class and every value has a type

This is what I do from the start in https://tablam.org and only later found that is not common! Is so intuitive this way and simpler to check, by a lot. In fact, I waste so much time adapting type inference algorithms that are hard to translate because for some reason graphs are imposed on trees, types are second-class and live at a distance (and erased) and all is a mess this way.

The relational model already makes this so simple: `project / rename / extend` relational operators cover you.

From this other facilities become possible. Note how in `SQL` you don't have functions as first-class per se, but now try to imagine that a function is a table and suddenly, is much better!

My relational lang (https://tablam.org) that I wish to be a Excel + Access replacement is still half-backed.

I move it slowly in my personal computer but not much in public. Maybe adding another person will help me on that!

> what is a good alternative to Access (or Fox, I add)

Nothing.

Access is(was) in fact a worse alternative to Fox:

- Much worse DB engine, and that is saying a lot (FoxPro db can and get corrupted. A typical functionality that was added to any fox codebase was a utility to fix it)

- MUCH MUCH worse programming language (VB) that is neither good as-is, much less as a data-programing language.

Fox/dbase is the only data-oriented language that was relatively popular and fit for the use-case.

This is by a mile the main point: Is a desert looking for languages that are made for business app/data oriented programing (and much harder looking for something not weird).

The main options: Fox/dBase/Informix(? not remember), kdb+, Cobol, SQL(when extended as store procedure lang with loops and that)

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This point is big. Having a good form builder (that is already rare) is not enough to be a real contender for this space. You need a language where making queries is truly nice.

In short, you need a language that is `LINQ/Relational` as first-class end-to-end.

- If this lang needs an ORM: FAIL.

- If this lang needs to compose strings to make a query: FAIL.

- If exist "impedance mismatch" between data manipulation/queries and the rest of the lang: FAIL.

- It should also support super-advanced types like date, decimal, currency and ideally dimensional units. Ideally algebraic types as today.

- It should have a version of Rust `serve, Into/From` for easy conversion between data + formats.

- It should look "normal" like python/swift with `LINQ` queries.

This is the lang I trying to build: https://tablam.org

> I asked was about querying data without ever using a SQL language, like tapping directly into the data.

I agree (making https://tablam.org to try a fix & working on https://github.com/clockworklabs/SpacetimeDB in the SQL conformance).

Before I think SQL was bad. *Now I'm certain*. SQL is absurdly massive for things that could have collapse all the features 10x or more.

However, working in an RDBM now I also understand why is not desirable to make "raw" calls to the DB: The engine MUST mediate all the calls to make things works (from query optimization, execution, iteration, lock management, transaction management, etc).

Is incredible how much sophistication is in a simple `SELECT * FROM table`.

What I wish is to build a `Wasm-like` IR so that is what anybody target, and `SQL` is not the mediator.

In my case each lang I have learned (+12) I start coding a mini-ORM. I have done the same so many times, and that is a good way to learn from me. Also, I have to learn Rust building https://tablam.org.

It sounds puzzling, I start learning Rust with https://tablam.org and probably was making my life harder trying to do "advanced" stuff when not have any idea of what I was doing.