Josh Creek
5453e19761
Each ten-second queue heartbeat mints a fresh idempotency key and permanently inserts a row. Published outbox rows and expired/revoked sessions were never purged either -- the maintenance role performed lifecycle reconciliation only. At 10,000 queued players heartbeats alone add roughly 60,000 durable rows per minute, so table and index growth, vacuum pressure, backup size and recovery time were all unbounded on a service intended to scale horizontally. Add retention windows chosen to exceed every retry and recovery horizon that could still consult the row -- deleting an idempotency key early would turn a client replay into a second real mutation, so this is a correctness bound, not just a housekeeping one. Dead-lettered outbox rows are kept longest, being the record of events never delivered. Deletes run in bounded SKIP LOCKED batches so a purge never blocks live traffic, never holds a long transaction, and concurrent maintenance replicas do not contend. Indexes back each predicate so a pass cannot degrade into a sequential scan of the table it is bounding. The maintenance role reports rows purged, the backlog past its window (deletion lag), and any dead-lettered events. Also make the migration-rollback test derive its step counts instead of hardcoding them: adding a migration silently shifted the fixed counts so the failure surfaced as an unrelated "0006 rollback did not drop matches.allocation_id".
Cosmic Clash
In "Cosmic Clash," the heart-pounding action takes place in variable gravity environments where vehicles hover just above the ground. In this thrilling spiritual successor to Rocket League, players engage in high-speed, gravity-defying matches set in the far reaches of space. Each pitch is situated in a unique environment or planet, offering breathtaking vistas and challenging terrain. But instead of cars, competitors pilot rocket-powered ships, each equipped with its own set of customisable features and special abilities.
Ships hover just above the ground, defying the laws of physics and adding an extra layer of intensity to the gameplay. With no friction to hold them back, players must master the art of control as they glide effortlessly across the pitch, executing precise manoeuvres and lightning-fast aerial tricks. With precise control and lightning-fast reflexes, players boost, drift, slam and even turn upside down on their way to victory, scoring epic goals against their opponents.
Whether you're soaring through asteroid fields, navigating treacherous alien landscapes, or battling in the depths of cosmic storms, "Cosmic Clash" delivers non-stop action and adrenaline-pumping excitement that's out of this world! Get ready to take your skills to the stars and dominate the galaxy in the ultimate celestial showdown!
Reason for being
Since Epic Games bought Psyonix, Rocket League has never been the same, and rather than releasing an Unreal Engine 5 version of the game, or giving any meaningful updates, instead item trading was removed and 'Rocket Racing' was added to Fortnite. With no one else stepping up to the plate, it falls to the Open Source Community to come up with a spiritual successor, to keep the spirit of the game alive.
Legality
The concept of 'vehicle soccer' cannot be copyrighted, but the original expression of ideas such as the specific code, art, music and narrative of a game can be. So long as all code, assets game design and other elements are made from scratch, this project will remain legal. The use of an alternative game engine, Godot, serves to ensure that this is achieved, as does the move to using space ships instead of cars as the vehicles.
Technical Information
Cosmic Clash is a single Godot 4.7 project, written entirely in GDScript. That same project exports both the interactive game and a headless dedicated server for online multiplayer. See docs/TECH_STACK.md for the full stack and the reasoning behind each choice.
Online play with casual and ranked queues is a 1.0 requirement, and it needs a backend service for identity, matchmaking and ratings — separate from the Godot project. That control plane is written in Go (with PostgreSQL, Redis and Agones on Kubernetes), chosen for the Agones/Kubernetes-native ecosystem rather than for raw speed: it never touches a simulation packet. See docs/MATCHMAKING.md for the design and docs/TECH_STACK.md for why Go over C#, Rust or C++.
Contributing
Eventually there will be contributor guidelines, but for now open a PR and make sure it has been formatted according to the auto-formatting rules.
Gameplay
The core gameplay is still football/soccer but with vehicles, however there are key changes to the format used in Rocket League. The vehicles are now space ships, which hover above the surface of the pitch. This will impact core game mechanics, enabling near-immediate changes in direction (thanks to those spacefaring engines!), the ability to play upside down (which will change the way you interact with the ball in as-yet unknown ways), slamming down at full boost speed, and many more that will be discovered along the way.
Bots
There will be default bots available, trained using reinforcement learning, and it will be possible to train your own using a gym for submission to be included in the game itself. It will NOT be possible to connect bots to the game, and with the community itself ensuring rigorous anti-cheat measures are in place we will aim to keep it that way. Cheaters have no place here.
MVP
The original local-only milestone is complete; the 1.0 scope now includes
dedicated online play plus casual and ranked matchmaking. Community servers
remain self-hostable, while project-hosted match servers are allocated per
match through the provider-portable control plane described in
docs/MATCHMAKING.md. Split-screen remains deferred.
Monetisation
The aim for this project is NOT to monetise it. Rocket League saw terrible changes once the Item Shop was added, and even the costs for crates and keys prevented some members of the community from collecting items and fully enjoying the game. Instead, this game will, if it becomes successful enough to warrant online servers, only use funding to keep itself running, and in the event anyone needs to be employed full time to maintain it with a growing playerbase, to pay them a fair wage for their time. Any additional profit in any given year should be held for maintaining servers in the future should demand fall, or for any future needs of the game such as a large effort to upgrade to a new engine, anti-cheating measures, etc.