This post describes the project Armored Bits which myself and my buddy cerbermus have been working on for over half a year in our spare time. The goal is to build a realtime, network team based, player programmable 3d mech simulator. As the title suggests the core game server is being written in Haskell, a choice I made after having been inspired by a QuakeCon talk with John Carmack, the linked video a part of that talk specifically about functional programming and games.

Picking a language to write your game/system/service in shouldn’t really be a hard choice, yet as developers we tend to get hung up on which technology we want to use. After all, you will be stuck with your choice once steam picks up, and for a myriad of reasons (usually business) switching stacks becomes incredibly hard the further along you are. Since we are building a realtime game server (in the First Person Shooter sense), we had a small list of criteria.

Game AI Programming Simulator 🔗In A.I. Apocalypse, book 2 of the Singularity series by William Hertling, the following phrases briefly describe a game played inside the novel: “Two years later the Mech War gaming platform was introduced just prior to the Christmas season. It became the must-have game. The old standby worlds went vacant, their online environments quickly becoming ghost towns. Mech War became not just the best massively multiplayer online game, it quickly became the only game left standing.