A home for my projects — shipped, in progress, and still just sparks. Move your cursor through the void.
Orrery is the networking layer beneath the world. Move a crowd the normal way and the cost climbs with every entity you add. Orrery barely moves — the same handful of bytes no matter how large the crowd. Push the crowd higher below and the gap only widens.
Why "Orrery"? An orrery is a clockwork model of the solar system — a set of fine brass gears that turns to reproduce the orbits, speeds, and motions of every planet and moon around the Sun. A small mechanism standing in for something vast.
Each node is an in-memory database backed by software transactional memory — and all the logic runs here. A node leases records from the store (watch a cell turn its colour), then runs every reducer as an atomic transaction in its own memory — committing, or retrying on conflict. A player's action reaches the gateway, commits on the node that owns the affected record, and streams straight back to that region's clients as a live delta. The store just holds the durable copy — the node reaches down to it only to lease a new record or persist a change (the occasional trip to the right). As load shifts, players are handed off between nodes. Click a player to send an action.
Why "Continuum"? A continuum is an unbroken whole with no divisions — like the spacetime continuum, where every point flows seamlessly into the next. One world with no seams, however many machines hold it up.
The world isn't a map — it's an interaction graph. Players are nodes; every interaction (proximity, combat, trade) is an edge. Servers own cohesive clusters of that graph, and the boundary between them is a min-cut — the fewest interactions crossing servers. As play shifts, the graph re-clusters: a heavy cluster splits along its weakest cut and a fresh server takes half; light ones merge. No spatial borders. Click to spark a burst of interactions and watch a cluster form, then split.
Why "Cosmic Web"? The cosmic web is the universe at its largest scale — galaxies drawn by gravity into glowing filaments and dense clusters, threaded across immense voids. A structure defined not by borders, but by what pulls together.
Every change the world makes is recorded, in order — a complete history you can rewind. The world's state is just those changes replayed in sequence, so you can travel to any moment: drag the timeline to rebuild the exact world at that point, or press play to watch it unfold. Nothing is ever overwritten — every step stays on the record. Drag the timeline, or press play.
Why "Ephemeris"? An ephemeris is an astronomer's table of positions — where every planet, moon, and comet sat in the sky at each moment in time. Look up any instant and read back the exact state of the heavens.