EMx 076: MUD Development and Grapevine

Nov 5, 2019

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On this episode of Elixir Mix the panelists interview Eric Oestrich, one of the regular panelists for the show. Eric is a developer at SmartLogic where he works with Elixir and recently has been working with deployments. He has a project called Grapevine which is similar to steam but for text games. Mark opens up the discussion by asking Eric to talk about his game ExVenture which is a MUD game. MUD stands for multi user dungeon and ExVenture is a multi user version of a text adventure game from 1978 called Dungeon. He shares more details of the game and how it’s played. Erit explains that Grapevine was spawned from ExVenture and Mark asks him to expound more on Grapevine. ExVenture is open source and it is an application that is currently running in production. This provides opportunity for those not interested in making or playing a MUD to get involved and work on a project. Eric also goes into detail about the livestreaming he does and how to get involved. Since the project is open source, Eric is able to do development live, on screen and this allows the viewer to see the development process first hand and watch Eric work through challenges in the code. The topic then shifts to some of the features that are in Grapevine. Eric details some of the OTP style concepts used, the types of servers used and how they’re used, and how telnet sessions are maintained for connecting. The Elixir Mix panelists also discuss how this application is deployed. The application is on DigitalOcean with 2 dedicated cores and he uses Docker to build the releases. Eric also explains how he uses scripting with his releases and how his deployments work. The panelists also discuss how Eric is using Docker for releases but not on the server and why he’s doing deployments the way he is. The last topic covered by the elixir experts is statistics. They cover the metrics section in Grapevine, how he uses Telemetry events, and other methods he uses to gather metrics Panelists

Mark Ericksen
Josh Adams
Erik Oestrich