A look inside X-Plane’s massive multiplayer server

This morning I published a blog post on the X-Plane Developer blog titled “Have You Heard the Good News About Elixir?.” It’s a look at the requirements and goals that drove me to choose Elixir for X-Plane’s massive multiplayer game server, with a look at both the pros and cons of that choice.

This post (and the feature itself!) was a long time in coming. It’s cool to be able to talk about it publicly.

On a related note, we open-sourced the Elixir implementation of the networking protocol we use for MMO. The README there gives a pretty good overview of the architecture of our MMO server—long story short, we go to great lengths to minimize shared state.

This won’t be of use to many people, but I do hope it’s useful to the next poor soul who needs to build a server around RakNet. ☺️