minimatch

Minimal Open Match replacement.

🚧 WIP: This project is incomplete and should not be used in production.

Why minimatch?

Open Match is a good solution for scalable matchmaking, but its scalability complicates the architecture. Most of us are game developers, not Kubernetes experts.

minimatch runs in a single process. All you need to run it is Go!

Features

Open Match compatible Frontend Service (gRPC only)
- Create/Get/Watch/Delete ticket
- Backfill
Run match functions and propose matches
Evaluator

Quickstart

minimatch consists of two parts: Frontend and Backend.

Frontend is an API Server for creating tickets and checking matchmaking status.

Backend is a job to retrieve tickets and perform matchmaking. You can pass the MatchProfile, MatchFunction and Assigner to the backend.

MatchProfile is the definition of matchmaking. It has pools for classifying tickets. MatchFunction performs matchmaking based on Ticket for each fetched pool. And Assigner assigns a GameServer info to the established matches.

The following is a minimal code. See examples/ for a more actual example.

var matchProfile = &pb.MatchProfile{...}

func MakeMatches(ctx context.Context, profile *pb.MatchProfile, poolTickets minimatch.PoolTickets) ([]*pb.Match, error) {
	// Matchmaking logic here
}

func AssignGameServer(ctx context.Context, matches []*pb.Match) ([]*pb.AssignmentGroup, error) {
	// Assign gameservers here
}

func main() {
	// Create minimatch instance with miniredis
	mm, err := minimatch.NewMiniMatchWithRedis()

	// Add Match Function with Match Profile
	mm.AddMatchFunction(matchProfile, minimatch.MatchFunctionFunc(MakeMatches))

	// Start minimatch backend service with Assigner and tick rate
	go func() { mm.StartBackend(context.Background(), minimatch.AssignerFunc(AssignGameServer), 1*time.Second) }()

	// Start minimatch frontend service with specific address
	mm.StartFrontend(":50504")
}

Use case

Testing matchmaking logic

Minimatch has Open Match Frontend compatible services. Therefore, it can be used for testing of matchmaking logic without Kubernetes.

minimatch has a helper function RunTestServer making it easy to write matchmaking tests. See examples/integration_test for more specific examples.

package xxx_test

import (
  "open-match.dev/open-match/pkg/pb"
  "testing"

  "github.com/castaneai/minimatch"
)

func TestSimpleMatch(t *testing.T) {
  s := minimatch.RunTestServer(t, map[*pb.MatchProfile]minimatch.MatchFunction{
    profile: minimatch.MatchFunctionFunc(MakeMatches),
  }, minimatch.AssignerFunc(AssignGameServer))
  frontend := s.DialFrontend(t)

  // ...
}

Small development environments

When environments are separated for development and production, you may want to reduce infrastructure costs for the development environment.

In such cases, minimatch can be installed instead of Open Match to create a minimum development environment. minimatch has an Open Match compatible Frontend Service, so there is no need to change the API!

See Simple 1vs1 matchmaking server for examples.

Differences from Open Match

minimatch is modeled after Open Match, but has some differences in its internal architecture.

See Differences from Open Match for details.

Scalability

Is minimatch really just a mini? No, it is not! Despite its name, minimatch has scalability. Please see Scalable minimatch.

Consistency and performance

Please see the following docs for consistency and performance to consider in minimatch.

Consistency and performance

Metrics

minimatch Backend exposes metrics in OpenTelemetry format to help monitor performance. Please see Metrics for details.