Your Head A’Sploder

I teased in the last status update, at the very bottom, how we were working on Sploder, the online ‘game creation kit’. As of today, that little project is done and on a final quality pass, so we’re in the clear to talk about it more in-depth. (Please excuse the lack of visual aids for this one; I’m not the one at the helm of this particular project, I merely know how it works.)

Sploder is absolutely massive. They have several million titles from people who created games on their engine from all over the planet, with some of their busiest days having over a thousand separate entries a day. Scraping this behemoth of a site would be an absolute nightmare for most people.

Not for our beloved DarkMoe, though. On a stream he hosted recently, he told me & others about how he built a bot to scrape, page by page, game by game, every creation on Sploder — everything from the levels to the authors, tags and ratings, to the data itself — and how it’s all gone into an absolutely massive 33GB database. That’s about double the size of our current Happy Wheels database, just FYI.

Alongside that comes a rewrite of the scripts that run on the site to fetch game data, add it to their players, and run the games. There’s more to it than just that though; there are tons of images, sounds and other resources that would drive the file count of Flashpoint into the tens of millions. Thankfully for us, Moe continues to be a beacon of bright ideas. He wrote a script that lets us store all of these loose images and extra resources in zip files. Overall, it drops the file count by about 99.9%.

The overall Sploder filesize hasn’t been tallied yet. We know the database of levels is going to be around 33GB. And doing some other estimations, we can assume that the image sizes can be anywhere near 100GB. If we decide to include those in 8.0 too, it’ll be a real chore to upload all at once. The database will absolutely go in, though…and with it, Sploder, arguably the biggest user-generated content platform to exist in Flash, will be saved.

If you have version 6.3, 7.0 or 7.1 of Flashpoint Ultimate, you can actually try out this tech, as we’ve had a demonstration of this in there for a while now. Most of the work with this completed database is gonna be dropping the full thing in, and some slight script optimizations.