Old Light is a browser strategy game: a whole galaxy you play in a tab, with star systems to claim, an economy to grow, fleets to build, and other players (plus the AI empires that live alongside them) to fight for territory. This post is about what you don't see while playing: the backend that keeps it all running.
Three things make that backend tricky, and almost every decision below comes from one of them.
It's real-time. There are no turns. Your economy keeps growing and your fleets keep moving even after you close the tab, so the server has to keep the world running on its own.
The browser is the client, and you can't trust it. Anything the browser sends could be faked, so the server, not the client, decides what is true.
It has to scale. I want it to hold around 1000 players at once. Each player is also surrounded by AI empires (roughly three per human), so 1000 players really means about 4000 active "actors" in the world. Every feature has to survive being multiplied by that number.
