Comment by amasad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by amasad | Hacker News Reader

Repl.it co-founder here -- happy to answer questions :)

This is just coming out and lots of users are building impressive games; here is quick small sample of things I found interesting:

- Super Mario: https://repl.it/@JONASRAINS/SMOB3-Python

- Pacman: https://repl.it/@argthe1st/Pacman

- Flappy Bird (hold space to fly): https://repl.it/@rennecastro/FlappyBird

- Dungeon game: https://repl.it/@AbrahamTinajero/VOLTHEGAME-V-061

- LOVE2D Ant: https://repl.it/@Essentuan/AntLove

- Evolution simulator: https://repl.it/@dumfing/OutpaceEvolution

- Doom style 3D maze: https://repl.it/@KatyaDelaney/GameJam-3DMAZE

I'm personally bullish on Pyxel -- the pico-8-like Python environment. Here is one of the example games running: https://repl.it/@amasad/jumper (make sure to check the sweet asset editor; instructions in the comment).

Also, I forgot to mention in the post but this works great with friends on Multiplayer -- you'll be able to interact with the same machine and output. Earlier this morning I watched YouTube with a bunch of random Twitter users: https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1108804242393821184 ^^

How many people were working on repl.it before the first public release, and for how long?

I have been following Repl.it since it's first release. We were quite amazed when repl.it was released. We, a bunch of students, were building a project very similar to what repl.it was in it's initial days, during the same time period. we never managed to get our project to an usable stage, and eventually everyone abandoned it.

I started working on the idea behind repl.it in 2009 when I was in college and had trouble coding because of all the setup. With the help of a friend I eventually got something usable in 2011 and open sourced. The engine powered lots if other sited including Codecademy and Udacity.

I got back to working on repl.it in 2016 and my co-founders joined me.

Why do you go the path of using LD_PRELOAD?

Could you not provide an alternate DISPLAY environment variable pointing to a little proxy X11

Either way it's a neat hack. Is the source for the redirector available? It would undoubtedly have wider applications.

That is so cool. Congratulations on the launch!

What VNC are you using?

Server: x11-vnc

Client: NoVNC

Are there any options available that utilize h264 as the screen delivery protocol in the browser? I’ve always just found VNC to be so finicky and laggy.

Cool demo!

We're working on taking a video stream from the frame buffer directly, ffmpeging it and streaming it down as video. We'll use VNC for input but not display.

Don't bother, it's not as performant as VNC (VNC overhead is higher but latency may be lower, depends whether you want to optimize for low latency and throughout versus server resource usage), especially once you take into account stuff like VirtualGL.

When will we be able to embed repl.it into an iframe?

You can, just like you see in the post. https://repl.it/site/docs/repls/embed

If you're talking about embedding the whole website then that's not doable. It's a security concern: Clickjacking etc.

What do you use for proxy?

We wrote our own in Go.

Open source it? There aren't many Docker aware proxies where sticky sessions is a first-class feature.

Go repl is super slow recently. I had to stop using it.

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