Introduction & Architecture Overview

Problem framing: why naive fan-out breaks at scale. An overview of the Black Skies distributed architecture and the constraints that shaped our design decisions.

Overview

This episode introduces the core problem: how do you build a real-time tactical game that supports 10,000 concurrent players in a single contiguous battle without time dilation?

Key Topics

• Why EVE Online’s Fury at FWST-8 matters (6,557 players @ 10% time dilation)
• The fan-out bottleneck: why broadcasting every event to every client doesn’t scale
• Spatial partitioning as the fundamental insight
• The 2 Hz tick rate decision and its implications

Timestamps

Architecture Diagram

The system uses a three-tier state model:

1. Coordination tier (etcd): Linearizable fencing tokens for tile ownership
2. Hot state tier (Redis): Per-tick entity positions, cooldowns, combat state
3. Cold storage tier (DynamoDB): Entity identity, inventory, persistent progression

Next Episode

Episode 2 covers node failure detection and cluster membership using SWIM gossip protocol.