Building a Doom-Like Multiplayer Shooter in Pure SQL

Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago

lvogel

255 points

39 comments

cedardb.comTechstory

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SQLGamingDatabase Technology

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SQL

Gaming

Database Technology

A developer built a DOOM-like multiplayer shooter using pure SQL, sparking discussion on the limits of SQL and the project's technical merits.

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Sep 9, 2025 at 11:12 AM EDT
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Discussion (39 comments)

Showing 39 comments

esafak

4 months ago

2 replies

This is a clever ad! I had not heard of them so I looked up the technology behind it: https://cedardb.com/docs/technology/

A Postgresql-compatible HTAP. It appears to be single server and closed source. Roadmap: https://cedardb.com/docs/roadmap/

zekrioca

4 months ago

1 reply

Would this multiplayer work on Postgresql?

ChrisWint

4 months ago

Depends on what you mean by "works" I guess. The statements all look like PostgreSQL SQL and should, therefore, all work. That said, they are pretty heavy duty, especially the recursive Ray tracing, so I expect it to lag quite a bit.

FridgeSeal

4 months ago

IIUC its a commercialisation of a research DB called Umbra which has some pretty amazing performance characteristics.

a3w

4 months ago

1 reply

THIS IS MADNESS.

Krieger, is that you? You went too far with it.

I am all for catgirl holograms, so good science by Archer's Krieger on that. But SQL should not run Doom. The limits of science have been pushed beyond madness!

Well okay, "does it run Doom" comes up here frequently.

But why not solve "does it run catgirls" first, if you are a real-life mad scientist?

lelanthran

4 months ago

1 reply

> Krieger, is that you? You went too far with it.

Is this a reference to Far Cry 1?

danielheath

4 months ago

Archer

lvogelAuthor

4 months ago

1 reply

If you want to take a look at the source code, here's the repo! https://github.com/cedardb/DOOMQL

halifaxbeard

4 months ago

unironically, this is such an elegant way to express ray marching

https://github.com/cedardb/DOOMQL/blob/f14b5ef9ef0b23045376b...

valorzard

4 months ago

2 replies

Feel like the logical extreme of this is a database built for multiplayer games, something like: https://github.com/clockworklabs/SpacetimeDB

Though there, you are still writing the main game logic in Rust or C#

lvogelAuthor

4 months ago

1 reply

Yea, I actually thought of the viability of SQL for games while working on DOOMQL. It's just so easy to express a lot of game logic in SQL queries. As an avid OSRS player I was thinking about doing a simple MUD/MMO next.

Thanks for the pointer to SpacetimeDB - haven't heard of it before!

all2

4 months ago

My understanding is that Spacetime db embeds the "system" component of an ECS into a DB. The rest of the ECS is in there too.

I briefly looked into it, but never got past that fundamental piece.

crooked-v

4 months ago

"Just build all the logic directly in the DB" is something I've thought about before for simple multiplayer online RPGs and the like, where quite a lot of things are effectively just a direct mapping from database to screen. But, using the general idea for 'twitch' gaming is really wild.

pjot

4 months ago

3 replies

Author of the mentioned DuckDB-DOOM here!

This is awesome - multiplayer is a great addition. Really like the cone in the mini-map too

selimthegrim

4 months ago

The post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43761998

IncRnd

4 months ago

This is pretty neat. I was expecting a WAD file to get loaded, but this was still pretty neat, even better than Windows XP in JS.

lvogelAuthor

4 months ago

Love that you liked it! Your project was the inspiration and showed me the insanity was actually feasible :D

ant6n

4 months ago

2 replies

It’s a very cool accomplishment. As a nerd of early shooters, I do wonder whether it’s fair to call it Doom-like. It’s clearly more untextured Wolfenstein 3d.

Are we sufficiently far from 1993 to just “round” it all to being Doom-like? certainly it’s better for eyeballs.

johnisgood

4 months ago

1 reply

Yeah, it is definitely Wolfenstein 3D in my opinion. Many Doom-clones are. Maybe Wolfenstein 3D is a Doom-clone in itself? I dunno, I do not know the history. Can anyone enlighten me?

nemomarx

4 months ago

2 replies

Wolfenstein came first, Doom followed from the same team. While some doom clones at the time continued to use the Wolfenstein engine it was fairly brief. Rise of the triad is I think the most impressive one using basically the Wolfenstein model?

jandrese

4 months ago

1 reply

Depends where you want to draw the line. You could trace the lineage all the way back to Rogue with its grid map where the player is fixed to the grid and moves in full block increments. Then you had those 3D maze games where you were still on the grid and stuck moving in cardinal directions, but you got a 3D representation of the area. Then Wolfenstein allowed the player to move freely on the same grid map. Finally Doom (finally!) dispensed with the grid and made the map out of vectors.

wduquette

4 months ago

Not knocking your history, but I gotta say that Wolfenstein-3D was like nothing I'd ever seen...and I played the original Wolfenstein on the Apple II--and the original Wizardry as well, which is a lot more to the point than Rogue IMHO. The Wizardry map grid and the Wolfenstein-3D map grid are really similar, now that I think about it.

int_19h

4 months ago

Catacomb 3D (also by id Software) came first. Wolfenstein 3D was a further development of the same tech that happened to be much more popular, hence why people mostly remember that.

As I recall there were a few games using a similar engine at the time, it's just that they didn't left much of an impression. Some examples would be Blake Stone and Corridor 7.

omoikane

4 months ago

Part of the brilliance of Doom has got to be this short one-syllable name, so all later games that did raycasting would call themselves "Doom-like" as opposed to "Wolfenstein-like". The latter is just too many syllables.

romperstomper

4 months ago

4 replies

I'd say this is more like Wolfenstein 3D :)

gs17

4 months ago

1 reply

For some reason it's really common to call this kind of project a "Doom clone" despite it not having the features that made Doom notable at the time. Honestly, it's impressive enough that it doesn't need to be tied to being a "[90s game] clone".

dspillett

4 months ago

There was a time when any FPS game was referred to as a Doom-a-like or Doom clone. Heck, eventually even tihngs with a first person view but no shooting, or that pre-dated Doom (Doom was a step change in a few ways but it certainly wasn't the first FPS, I remember some more primative attempts as far back as the mid-to-late 80s). The current referring-to-everything-as-a-doom-clone is basically an extension of that.

lvogelAuthor

4 months ago

1 reply

That's just my age showing, I guess. For me, all 2.5D shooters are DOOMlikes. I was actually first thinking about calling it a Quake-like since IMHO that is much more well known for its multiplayer, but then I never got around to implement powerups and all the other stuff people might have expected.

boxed

4 months ago

DOOM was revolutionary because it switched from raycasting like Wolfenstein to a binary tree rendering system that allowed much more complex architecture.

If it's using raycasting, it's not DOOM-like...

YeGoblynQueenne

4 months ago

I'd say it's more like Angband.

to11mtm

4 months ago

tbh feels like OG Wolf crossed with some early text based 'first person' RPG crossed with real time updates...

I suppose if there's one frustration it's that various 8/16bit dooms are out there including asciidoom and wondering why the better UX/vis of those weren't a thing...

ForHackernews

4 months ago

There's also pg_doom that runs Doom as a Postgres extension https://github.com/DreamNik/pg_doom arguably less impressive because PG extensions can be normal(ish) C.

OhMeadhbh

4 months ago

"Programming languages differ not so much in what they make possible, but in what they make easy."

dspillett

4 months ago

In Pure SQL [caveat in super-fast TV advert disclaimer voice: if you define “pure SQL” as including 150 lines of Python for the main game loop and input processing]

Though doing all the game state updates and rendering in SQL is impressive.

boredinstapanda

4 months ago

Reminds me of the text mode Doom before the ASCII mode video drivers.

I couldn't find the site after a quick search,maybe the wayback machine.

alexchantavy

4 months ago

Do it in Neo4j now lmao

paulryanrogers

4 months ago

I feel like these more extreme efforts barely qualify as running Doom. Technically I guess it's Doom in pure SQL, not running on it (since that suggests hardware).

Other efforts such as Doom (like) CAPTCHA or Doom in TypeScript types are either so incomplete, unplayable, or so absurdly abstract that it strikes me as desperate cries for attention.

That said, people have all kinds of weird interests, so to each their own. I'd just prefer these absurd efforts didn't take up so much attention that they distract from artistic efforts with more to say than "look what I can do". Even some other efforts in Doom; like "Thatcher's Techbase", "Kriegsland: Blutorden", "Blades of Agony", or HDoom.

flykespice

4 months ago

The previous trend was about trying to run DOOM on as many constrained devices as possible

now it has evolved to trying to prove turing-completeness on the least places you'd expect it to be.

1341234134

4 months ago

love having sex with kids tbh

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ID: 45183050Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 7:55:16 PM

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