Tilework

Overview

Tilework is an open source 2D virtual office in the spirit of the classic Gather experience. Your team walks around a pixel-art map, meets colleagues, talks by proximity, joins meeting rooms and shares screens, all in the browser.

Tilework is an independent open source alternative to Gather, with no affiliation with the original product. It uses only original code and assets (or compatible licences).

#What makes it different: efficiency

Most virtual offices are heavy. Tilework is designed around a budget:

  • Server: one Go process runs an authoritative world per office, with a spatial index and areas of interest, so a player is never compared against everyone else.
  • Network: movement is sent as small, batched, incremental updates at 10-15 Hz. Slow clients get the newest position instead of a growing backlog.
  • Browser: the whole static map is baked into one texture; only what the camera can see is drawn; hidden tabs stop rendering but keep calls alive; an economy mode caps the frame rate.
  • Media: audio and video go through a real SFU (LiveKit). Rooms are small and created on demand, and only authorised tracks are subscribed.

These are design goals. Capacity numbers are targets to validate, not proven results. See Efficiency and benchmarks and Status.

#How the pieces fit

 Browser (React + PixiJS)
    |  WebSocket (world, presence, chat)         WebRTC (audio/video/screen)
    v                                                    v
 Go server  -- issues scoped tokens / removes users -->  LiveKit SFU
    |
    v
 SQLite (WAL): offices, users, memberships, sessions, maps

Three concerns are kept apart on purpose:

  1. World state, presence and movement: in memory, in the Go server.
  2. Durable data: SQLite. Movement is never persisted, only the last position when someone leaves.
  3. Audio, video and screen sharing: the SFU. The app server only decides who may join which room.

#Where to go next

Edit this page on GitHub