https://misael.org/tags/real-time/Real-Time - Tag - Misael ZapataHugo -- gohugo.ioenThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://misael.org/bytes-over-the-wire-io-games/Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000Misael Zapatahttps://misael.org/bytes-over-the-wire-io-games/ Open devtools on agar.io and the Network tab is eerily still: no polling, no JSON endpoint, just one WebSocket handing you columns of hex. This is what those bytes say. One-byte opcodes whose meaning flips depending on which direction they’re travelling, a node record with every field at a fixed offset and not a character of it spelling out ‘x’, little-endian everywhere with a DataView gotcha that folds a whole frame into a diagonal smear, and the decision that matters most: the server holds the entire world and ships each player only their sector, so the packet scales with a screen instead of with the population. Years ago I hit the same wall with a Tornado server and JSON, and a fire took the code before I could brag about the fix.]]>