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DB design question - multiplayer game

I am new to DB design. I am trying to write a board game (4 players max) and was trying to come up with a way to communicate moves among each other. I am using a DB for this as per suggestions on stackoverflow.

My problem is this - When player A makes a move that move has to be read by B,C and D. So the fact that A made the move needs to be communicated to B,C and D. I am doing it the followin开发者_如何学JAVAg way. Please tell me if there is a better way to do it. To me it seems all wrong and incredibly flaky.

I have a table with the following fields -

gameId, userMove, flagA, flagB, flagC, flagD

So when A makes the move I write among other things - (flagA=0, flagB=1, flagC=1, flagD=1)

When B,C or D read A's move they decrement their corresponding flag.

A will not update the table unless all flags are 0.

Same thing happens when others make their moves.

Comments? There has to be a better way for this. The things I am seeing wrong here -

  • I am looping on a select until all flags are 0 for A
  • I am looping on a select until the flag for the corresponding user is set to read the move.

That is a lot of server load and client timeouts I need to worry about.

I hope I have been able to explain my problem clearly. Please ask questions if needed.

Any help is appreciated.

EDIT: The game is web based (runs in a browser) and I am using php for the server side development and so I cannot use an in-memory cache though I would have loved to do that if possible.

Thanks, - Pav


If the players of your game will be interacting with one game server during a single game session, it looks like you can keep all that state in memory.

Databases are great for durable storage of data with guarantees for atomicity, consistency and integrity. However, you don't seem to need any of these features for the temporal state that you are describing.


If flagA,B,C and D are all bits you might consider putting them all into one column and treating that column as a bit mask.

This will allow one column to control all flags. It can make your selects and updates much cleaner.

Read up on using bitmasks here:

  • http://www.gordano.com/kb.htm?q=966
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mask_%28computing%29


Have you considered usng a file to store the info?

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