Rocket Engine - plugin-free browser game development
rocketpack.fi
rocketpack.fi
Could we stop voting stuff like this onto the front page? I'm sure it'll be cool when they actually build it, but right now it's just an hour's worth of brainstorming and 20 minutes of somebody's time in photoshop. There's absolutely nothing to see, so it's not of any value to us now.
I know that everybody considers this as a Minimum Viable Product, and that you're supposed to launch something like this for every idea you have. That's cool. And I know you're supposed to get as much exposure to it as you can.
But please please please, don't spam up HackerNews with stuff like this. I want to think we're better than that.
Can we make a policy of only submitting things that exist?
There's no product though. There's nothing to download, nothing to sign up for, no way to actually get the thing and try it out.
Hopefully one day they'll get the product to the point where we can try it out and have a meaningful discussion about it. Until then, there's no reason for it to be here.
Please, just stop posting. It's rude to the guys who made this. They're not liars, they're just showing off a WIP.
Not sure if they added this since you posted, but there is a form to give them your name and e-mail which, presumably, will result in them sending you a link to download the trial.
A product not yet ready to be released clearly does not equate to that product not existing.
Nor does being angry entitle you to infer someone else is somehow lying when they say the app being demonstrated exists.
While this appears to be a false positive brought on by their lack of a download page, I do not think the person you're replying to was out of line for thinking that's what this is.
The reason we did the video and the website is because the product exists, and we're now at the point where we'd like to get a few pilot projects with other game development companies going.
We've been working hard on this for half a year now. If you can accomplish the same in 20 minutes with Photoshop, more power to you.
Let it out to the world. People will use it. People will tell you what you need to do before you can release it as a product. It's amazing how much good feedback you can get just by letting people try your thing out.
You're doing yourself a disservice by disguising your thing as vaporware if it actually exists.
OTOH, I suspect Unity3D's performance is much better, as most browsers don't have GPU accelerated graphics yet.
Yes, games made with Unity are currently still accepted into the App Store but fact is that Unity does stand in violation with the TOS, and the plug COULD be pulled at any moment. If you, as an app developer/company, are ok with that risk then go right ahead! We clearly state that the status is uncertain, not that games are not currently accepted.
About the MMO features in Unity - we are talking about server side things in the chart (should probably clarify that). Right now Unity only offers RPC calls between clients via P2P without a centralised server, which means you'd need to develop a backend for running an MMO. You would also not be able to run the same code on the server (and possibly not even the same language). So needless to say that a LOT of extra work would be needed in order to even start an MMO project with in Unity. Also the requirement of a plugin (if the game is a browser title) would severely hamper potential user base. I'd say that the comparison is definitely fair as we offer both RPCs, parameter reflection and have an entire backend solution that is specifically designed to run the server side of your game with minimal effort. It also offers analytics, social identity handling, leaderboards and a lot of other services out of the box.
Don't get me wrong, I love Unity but its areas of utilization are kinda different from Rocket Engine's. We excel at browser games, MMOs and handheld web apps, whereas Unity is much more geared towards traditional 3d gaming.
Nevertheless, thanks for the feedback, and I'm glad to see such an active discussion here! :)
-Tommi Kiviniemi, Rocket Pack
From the movie, things look like they have serious lag.
I'm hoping this works, could be a great teaching tool.
If your hardware runs well Google Maps, it will run well this engine (and also the other very similar one - Aves from Dextrose). Rendering wise, it's the same technology.
Most of heavy lifting is done by compiled code of the browser, JavaScript just sets few parameters (as opposed to canvas, where you "micromanage" rendering in relatively slow scripting language).
One screenful of map is about 80-100 images, though performance wise there is still quite a lot of breathing room.
I did some stress tests and my notebook can easily handle many hundreds individual image sprites (done as absolutely positioned DOM elements).
Now physics, this may be slow to do in JavaScript. But with a type of games that work well with image sprites (basically anything where building blocks are large), this will probably not make too big problems as you will not have that many interacting objects (at once together at screen) and also interaction will be optimizable.
The "killer app" will probably be tile based strategies or role-playing games (see current top Facebook apps), so physics / pathfinding / AI would only need to deal with discrete grids, not some costly pixel precise collision detection.
http://www.clickteam.com/eng/tgf2.php
(i'm also a fan. an web games factory would be awesome.)
We got the developers over from France, and they still hold it in the UK every year, not far from my house.