multiplayer-next.md carried the Phase 8 checklist but not the numbered
tasks with acceptance criteria that work actually gets picked up from.
That format lives in multiplayer-todo.md section 7, which already hosts
Phase 7 as in-progress, so Phase 8 goes there too.
Tasks 8.1-8.20 across four groups: backend service (identity, rating
store, Glicko-2, queue), server orchestration and autoscaling, playlists
and client UI, and keeping Docker/CI green. Section 0's short list gains
an index entry, and the status header now says Phase 8 is a 1.0 launch
blocker and the first phase to add a component outside the Godot
project.
Three entries are measured findings rather than plans, each of which
would break a naive implementation: stdout block-buffering making a
log-grep readiness probe hang forever, the hardcoded 7777/udp port
preventing more than one match per host, and compose.phase6-smoke.yml's
dependence on the exact behaviour allocation work would change.
Also fixes a now-false cross-reference: a Phase 4 note read 'not
Phase 8' meaning 'not a later phase', written when no Phase 8 existed.
CLAUDE.md's 'never add new work to multiplayer-todo.md' rule gains the
new-phase exception it always had in practice - Phase 7 was already
there.
Casual/ranked queues need servers allocated per match and shut down
afterwards, so cost is incurred only while a match runs - while the
existing Docker and CI gates keep passing unchanged.
Measured against the repo's own cosmicclash-server image rather than
estimated: the runtime image is ~148 MB of content, and boot to the
server_started line is ~870 ms on the container's own clock. That was
taken under x86_64 emulation on an arm64 host, so it is a pessimistic
bound and is recorded as one - it needs re-measuring on native Linux
before it sets any timeout.
Two findings that would each break a naive implementation, both hit
while taking that measurement:
- Godot's stdout is block-buffered off a TTY. A detached container logs
nothing at all - server_started does not appear even after 35s - so an
orchestrator readiness probe that greps the log hangs forever. Probe
the UDP socket or flush explicitly.
- --port defaults to 7777 and the Dockerfile hardcodes EXPOSE 7777/udp,
so several matches cannot share a host without a port range or an
address per match. Being UDP, L7 ingress routing does not apply.
Also records the honest tension in 'only pay during a match': a server
must listen before players connect, and image pull plus scheduling can
dwarf 870 ms, so the recommendation is match-level scale-to-zero over a
small warm node pool rather than node-level scale-to-zero.
The rule for keeping verify-phase6 and verify-enet-integration green:
every allocation feature is opt-in via a ServerConfig flag defaulting to
current behaviour, with a second Compose file rather than mutating
compose.phase6-smoke.yml.
Josh Creek