What the hell is the Schemaverse?

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The Schemaverse is returning for our fifth year (woo!) but it continues to be arguably one of the more obscure games of the conference.

So, what is it? It is simply your classic space battle game. You start with a home planet, where you can build some ships and mine for resources. From there, you can use those resources to build/upgrade more ships, spanning out to conquer the rest of the planets from other players.

And what makes the Schemaverse unique then?

The entire game is written inside a PostgreSQL database, as a player you are a user that has full access to connect directly to the pubic facing database.

SELECT * FROM my_ships;

SELECT * FROM planets;

UPDATE my_ships
    SET
        -- MOVE THIS WAY
        destination=POINT(0,0),
        target_speed=max_speed,
        
        -- KEEP TRYING THIS UNTIL IT STARTS BEING SUCCESSFUL
        action='MINE',
        action_target_id=5 -- FU Planet #5
    WHERE name = 'Explorer';

Of course, most people don't sit there writing SQL all day, they write code to play for them! Perl, Python, PHP, R, Ruby, anything at all that can connect to Postgres is fair game. Others don't even bother with that and just exploit the many bugs in the system to win without any of that pesky strategy nonsense.

Thanks to this flexibility, the contest has a number of audiences, including:

• Database Administrators
• Programmers
• Artificial Intelligence Aficionados
• Crackers
• Curious

If you want to learn more leading up to DC, there are a number of resources you can check out:

• https://schemaverse.com
• https://schemaverse.com/tutorial/tutorial.php
• #Schemaverse on Freenode

-Abstrct