1990s Game Dev Algorithms for Distributed Systems
Classic physics engine algorithms — SAT collision detection and Morton Z-curve indexing — become viable on-chain primitives only where the execution model supports dynamic object access at runtime. Here's why EVM, Solana, and Aptos can't run them, and Sui can.
1990s Game Dev Algorithms for Distributed Systems launched on April 29, 2026 with 12 votes, #1,176 of 21,248 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches.
In plain words
1990s Game Dev Algorithms for Distributed Systems is a collection of computational methods from classic game development adapted for distributed computing environments. It is designed for software engineers and systems architects who need to implement game logic or similar real-time systems across multiple machines. The resource draws on algorithms from 1990s-era games and recontextualizes them for modern distributed system challenges, offering documentation and technical guidance for those interested in this specialized intersection.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
Imagine a global map simulation, a distributed land registry, or a radio frequency allocator. They all share one unbreakable rule: two people cannot own the exact same space. Polygons must not overlap. Traditional GIS solved this decades ago. But doing it on-chain —inside a strictly consensus-driven network without external servers—has long been considered impossible. Compute limits were simply too strict. I wrote Mercator , an open-source spatial indexing library for Sui. It lets you register polygons of any shape directly in a smart contract, mathematically guaranteeing zero overlap. Registering a 4-vertex polygon in Mercator costs about $0.0065. Registering twenty polygons costs exactly…from docs.merca.earth
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I have been working on this game somewhat sparsely for the past three years or so. However, it is still in a very early stage, and there is a lot of work to do. One of my friends encouraged me to post about it here, since he felt people might find interesting how I don’t use any libraries for it. The game can be played on a browser by virtue of WebAssembly. There are native ports using either MiniFB or SDL2, but you have to build those yourself. I decided to write the game in C because I feel like it is a simple language that a lot of people can understand well enough, and I didn’t think I…
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