The hub keeps a FIFO of waiting sessions; a second QuickMatch pops the
first, opens a room via the existing createInput/joinInput path, and
marks it to begin its own first game once both seats are connected in
the lobby. CancelQuickMatch, a dropped connection, and entering a room
by code all remove a session from the queue. Counts queued, cancelled
and matched pairings in metrics.
expvar counters for connections, rooms, games, submissions by rejection
reason, eliminations, chat, joins and bot moves, served on a separate
debug address so they never sit on the public mux, plus one structured
word_rejected log line per refused word carrying the normalized word and
its link. GET /readyz flips to 503 while draining; SIGTERM stops new
rooms, waits up to NOITU_DRAIN_TIMEOUT for live games, then shuts down.
GET /version and the startup log carry the build's git describe.
Fuzz targets for the frame decoder, the text sanitizer and Vietnamese
normalization; the last one found that composing before lowercasing
could leave a non-NFC result, now recomposed after lowering.
CI runs on dev as well as main, gates gofmt and golangci-lint, tracks the
buf major instead of an exact pin, and dependabot watches every
ecosystem. The lint findings that had been hidden by the default
per-issue cap are fixed.
PlayedWord.player_id was declared and read by the client but never set by
the server, so a room of three or four never showed who played each word.
The chain byline now comes from the room, with a producer-side test.
The process also gains the ceilings it was missing: a cap on live rooms and
on open sockets, a per-connection frame-rate limit so a payload-less frame
is no longer free, and an opt-in trusted-proxy list so the join limiter can
tell players apart behind the documented reverse proxy instead of putting
them in one bucket. The typed word is sanitized before the engine stores it,
since every seat is shown it; a room exiting on its idle clock releases the
sessions still bound to it; the dictionary builder escapes its SQLite path
like the store does and renames over the old database instead of deleting
it first.
bot.BoardFor and hub.roomCount were reachable from tests only and now live beside them; session.serve drops an always-true nil check (readLoop never returns nil); invisible characters in test literals become escapes; comments no longer cite plan phases; `.dockerignore` keeps the dump out of the build context. No behaviour change; vet, deadcode, staticcheck, go test -race, svelte-check and vitest green.
A room holds up to four people and needs two to start. Both numbers are
server constants sent to the client in RoomState, so the lobby draws
whatever the server allows and widening a room is a server change alone.
Failing a turn eliminates that player rather than ending the game. The
syllable and the used words survive them, the turn passes to whoever is
next, and the last player standing wins. Two seats is that same rule seen
from close up, which is why there is one implementation of it and not two.
A dead end still costs the first player to face it their own clock, as
before: they get their turn, and lose it. Everyone behind them has already
seen that board, so they go out together rather than each sitting out a turn
limit they cannot use — which leaves the player who closed the position
standing, the same outcome two players get.
A player who is knocked out keeps their seat. They watch the rest of the
game, chat included, with only the word input gone, and everybody lands back
in the same lobby when it ends. The result screen is the whole table, ranked
by who outlasted whom, with each score reported beside the place rather than
deciding it.
The turn clock is deliberately not paused for a seat that has dropped, so a
player who loses their connection on their own turn loses it the way anybody
else would. Their reconnect window decides only whether they are still in the
game afterwards. Any number of windows can be open at once, settled by one
timer armed for the nearest of them.
Starting waits for every guest, not merely the first: a room of four that
began on one yes would have dealt three people a turn they never agreed to.
Kicking names a seat and is still refused on a player who is ready, and on
the owner's own — leaving is what an owner who wants out does, and it hands
the room on. Joining stays a lobby thing: a room with a game running turns a
latecomer away even with seats going spare, because there is no way to hand
somebody a game already in progress.
BREAKING CHANGE: RoomState, TurnUpdate and GameOver lose the fields that
could only ever describe a second player, OpponentLeft is retired in favour
of presence on RoomState, and suggestions move to the new PlayerEliminated —
they describe the position that beat a player, which by the end of a longer
game is nobody else's position. ProtocolVersion goes to 2, so a client built
against 1 is refused with a readable error rather than decoding a frame that
now means something else.
Chat belongs to the room rather than to a game, so it works in the lobby
while they agree on one, during it, and in the lobby it ends in.
A player is replayed what was said while they held their seat. That is what
a refresh restores, and it is also the boundary: a room code is pasted into
group chats by design, so somebody who redeems one starts at silence rather
than reading what the last two people said. A seat records where the
conversation stood when it was filled; the room keeps twenty lines and no
more, so a room that lives all day cannot grow.
Text is untrusted input rendered in a stranger's browser, so it goes through
the filter nicknames already used — now with a cap on stacked combining
marks, which that filter admitted. Twenty runes made mark stacking a
curiosity; two hundred make it a glyph cluster tall enough to cover the
board, and it would sit in the history being replayed to everyone who
followed.
Talking is not playing. A chat message does not reset the room's idle clock,
or one open tab could hold a room and its code for the life of the process
by typing into it once every nine minutes. It does not spend the move budget
either, and a line to a player who cannot keep up is dropped rather than
allowed to close their session — losing a line is recoverable, losing a
session mid-game costs them the game. A history is not droppable that way:
it is the frame that corrects a whole panel, and there is nothing behind it.
When a seat is vacated its words stay and its author goes, name included,
and the player who stayed is re-synced rather than left holding a name that
the next person through the door could ask for.
A room used to be a wrapper around one game: joining started it, and the
room died with it unless both players accepted a rematch inside thirty
seconds. It is now a lobby that outlives its games.
Whoever created the room owns it and the other seat is the guest. The guest
readies and the owner starts; the owner has no readiness of their own,
because starting is the same statement. A finished game returns both to the
lobby, where the next one is agreed exactly as the last was — the readiness
that started a game is spent with it.
A guest takes their readiness back before leaving, which is deliberate
friction: a player the owner is waiting on should have to say so before
walking away. The owner can free the seat of a guest who is not ready, and
not of one who is — readiness is a commitment, not an inconvenience. An
owner who leaves hands the room to whoever is left, unreadied, because they
are the one who starts now.
Something has to bound a room that outlives its games: the last player out
closes it, as does ten minutes in a lobby nobody started a game in. A
dropped connection is still not a player leaving — the seat is held for the
reconnect window in the lobby as well as mid-game, so a refresh no longer
costs somebody their room, and a resume lands in the lobby it left.
The rematch handshake is retired, and RoomCreated and RoomJoined go with it.
All three described part of what RoomState now describes in full, and three
messages for one lobby is three ways for a client to hold a view of it the
server never had. One snapshot per recipient, broadcast from the one place
that knows an input is finished, so no handler can forget to send it.
A finished room now stays alive to ask both players whether they want another,
and restarts with a fresh opening word once both do. Only a room with two
connected humans offers one: a bot has nothing to negotiate, so a bot room
closes the moment its game ends rather than leaking a goroutine and an engine
per finished game.
turn_seq no longer restarts at one. A rematch reuses the same connections, so a
submission still in flight from the previous game could otherwise match a turn
in the new one and be applied to it.
The end-of-game decision sits after the whole select, so every way a game can
end reaches it. Opening the offer from the message arm alone meant the turn
clock — the most common natural ending — closed the room with nothing to accept.
A resume is refused into a finished game, including one waiting on a rematch
answer, so the room now retires the connection being replaced only once it has
agreed to the swap. Retiring it up front ended the game the client was trying
to rejoin, which a duplicated tab was enough to trigger.
attach releases the room it is leaving. Nothing else told that room the
connection had gone, so a session asking for several rooms stranded all but the
last, each parked in select holding a goroutine and a room code for the life of
the process.
Also: RequestRematch is rate limited, because it is the only client message
that fans out to both players and an unbounded one lets a burst fill the
opponent's outbox until their session is closed for falling behind. And a
resume announces itself to the opponent, who was otherwise left watching a
disconnect banner for someone already playing again.
One goroutine owns each room and its engine. The room goroutine starts before
anyone is seated and seating is itself a message, so reading run() is a complete
proof of the concurrency contract rather than a convention to uphold. The bot
searches a frozen copy of the board instead of the live engine.
Reads carry no deadline; liveness is ping-based, because a read timeout cannot
distinguish a healthy player idling in the lobby from a dead socket.
The hub no longer binds a joiner to a seat before the room decides whether to
seat them. Anyone holding a room code could previously resign or play on a
seated player's behalf, and the room code is the only credential online 1v1 has.
cmd/noitu-server serves the API and, when NOITU_WEB_DIR is set, the built
frontend, with unknown paths falling back to index.html for client routes. All
configuration is environment-only and every variable has a working default.
tiennm99