Space Frigates
spacefrigates.com
spacefrigates.com
There has been a dedicated community of thousands of players, many of which have been playing well over a decade. Plenty of videos on youtube under either "Subspace" or more recently "Continuum".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubSpace_(video_game)
Also - a plug for my favorite Zone: HZ. www.rshl.org.
Got the CTO of the startup I was working at into this game. One day his wife came in and saw me playing and said "Oh, you play this too." And I told her "Yeah, I was the person who introduced So-and-so to it." She hissed out "That was YOU?!" and walked away real fast. Never spoke to me again.
While typing this up I discovered Infantry is actually still alive, resurrected by some diehards on free player-maintained servers! Can't imagine that happening for any of today's games in twenty years. It's probably just nostalgia, but to me the early 2000s were a special golden age of PC gaming and community that will never be topped.
If anybody played Infantry, the EOL zone was based on Extreme Games. Though it would blow my mind if anyone knows what I'm talking about.
Lag-attaching as a strategy is an incredible example of how innovative gamers were given latency restraints. :) Shout out to Explosive, my first EG Squad.
I was in one of the better clans at the time and the sheer skill of some of those players was astounding.
Team-based multi player, slow paced, casual, 10-15 minute games. I got World of Tanks in that category, anything else?
Wasted many hours on that game, was truly ahead of it's time in '95 with massive zones and lag compensation.
Technically Hockey Zone runs on something called ASSS (a small subspace server) which enables significantly more advanced features than the base client such as instant replay and dynamic scoreboard overlays.
Thanks!
That's just my experience as well. There are many other types of ships like bombers with big explosive, slow shots with blast effect, and other ships that can have other players attach to them as turrets. If your team in the arena can escort a bomber safely to a base with some fighters, you can often nuke the enemy right through the walls and capture the flag there. Meanwhile if you are just piloting a fighter it's a big win to take out one of the turret ships. Then there's other ships like ones that can cloak and fire sneak attacks, etc..
Essentially: distill gameplay to a relatively small number of rules + iterate balance until it's incredibly finely tuned + let the playerbase go nuts with whatever strategies they can come up with.
The attraction being that they're easy to pick up (few rules to learn) but incredibly deep (complex interactions and strategies).
Coupled with the fact that circa-late-90s, the idea of an MMO was still mind blowing. Games with friends and strangers?!
From memory, SubSpace also had a fairly addictive loot mechanic (tiered materials, item construction, randomly timed rare enemy spawns).
It was also the first game I wrote aimbots for -- which got shared among friends.
TrenchWars warbird sniping was a favorite.
p.s. a fond memory : getting ready to flinch when the thunderclap wav plays upon client execution
1: https://steamcommunity.com/app/352700/discussions/0/16960406...
P.S. the chat can be quite toxic though. It changed for the worse in the last four years.
[1] https://lutris.net/games/subspace-continuum/
[2] https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio...
Screw Spiders.
- Never keep any controls pressed down. Consider each single keypress as a discrete action that consumes energy. The more conservative you are with keypresses, the more energy you keep.
- Because it's busy, you have to accelerate right after spawning, otherwise you're in the hellzone and people will actually spawn inside you, causing instant death.
- The down arrow will brake/stop your ship, no matter which direction you're pointing. This is handy when you approach the edge of the map.
- Try cruising along the edge of the map at a leisurely pace, avoid the center, and pwn slowly.
Edit:
Pinging 13 times I got: rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 125.981/217.330/322.054/63.585 ms
>200ms ping average, 64ms median deviation, yeah I bet the packets have to go to the server before it responds and that explains everything. The weird thing is that it was still an issue while I was alone on the server so it can't have been overloaded.
To my own website that's 37.490/39.462/41.610/1.199 ms, so it's not my connection.
Is there a multiplayer (specifically, co-op) option?
(I've done enough ops work to be impressed everything was still loading even if the backends clearly weren't quite keeping up :)
Shall have to try again later.
Key-words for those searching: cross-platform, open source, multi-player, fun.
At the time netrek was near unplayable on my 386. But I got the optional 387 FPU and a S3-801 (that had hardware support for vectors) and suddenly netrek, xpilot, and similar vector games played great.
8 vs 8 (plus up to 16 spectators) e-sports in the mid 90s!
Why is no one giving their honest opinion on Space Frigates, which can only possibly be negative? I suppose there is a culture of fear in HN comment sections, people are afraid of pointing out when something is obvious amateur hour garbage because they don’t want to get spanked with downvotes or a shadowban for hurting someone’s feelings. Is this really necessary? Why protect someone’s feelings? Sometimes people need to hear what they don’t really want to hear, otherwise you’re just enabling their delusion and they never improve themselves.
1. I'm too young to die
2. Hey, not too rough
3. Hurt me plenty
4. Ultra-Violence
5. Nightmare!
6. NBN
I left the brakes as is for now because the game was very difficult with out them.
However, to retain the level of realism that I was hoping for I plan to rework the brakes such that they show the ship slows to a stop properly.
For example, the onboard computer should calculate the actual thrusters needed to stop the ship for the player.
Edit: Nvm. It seems I wasn't noticing debris being generated by shooting it instantly.
- I guess enough people here thought it was worth a try
If you want to give it another try now that traffic has died down the performance is a lot better.
Thanks!
Why is everyone in this comment section seemingly unable to say anything negative about Space Frigates? This deserves its own 2 hour documentary.
I’m tempted to submit a random .io game and see how people react.
Yes, you are correct. In fact, this has been something I have gone back on forth on myself.
I do actually have an “on board computer” That sits between what the player tried to do and what the ship actually does.
For example, the on board computer will only allow the pilot to fire the rotational thrusters to a certain max angular momentum.
I’ve also experimented with having the on board computer automatically stop rotation by firing the opposite rotational thruster for the pilot automatically.
The thing is, it was a pain because whatever we that degree turn was was never just right.
So, when you tried to fire at another ship you would often rotate a little too much or a little not enough.
Having it the way it is now we’re the pilot has to manually control angular velocity gives the. More precise control.
So that is why that is the way it currently is. But, many people have had the same feedback...
What I am thinking about doing is having a control on the HUD where pilots can choose manual versus automatic and also set the amount of predefined degree of rotation they want when in automatic.
I think that might be the best of all worlds?
But if you ask me to apply even a fraction of the effort spent learning vim or stick shift to learning a lo-fi space shooter, my question is "why" and my answer is "no thanks." It's not that it's impossible, it's that the juice is not worth the squeeze, at least for me.
I admit that the controls are not intuitive for somebody who has never played the game.
I do enjoy the controls and find that they make the game very challenging but I do understand that it will drive away many potential players.
I think that the "why" will eventually be that there will be a lot more content. My long term visual is to grow the game into more than a simple shooter. I eventually plan to have larger ships with more components to control.
I hope that as the game progresses the content will justify more of a learning curve. For example, many people have taken the time to learn Dwarf Fortress because it is an awesome game with tons of content.
But I'm a long, long way from that.
So, to your point, I may need to make the controls more intuitive until the content justifies a larger learning curve.
Thanks for the feedback,
Dave
I’m using the Meteor JS full stack framework as the base framework.
Really convenient for an app like this where parts of the code, like the game engine, need to run on the client and server and be identical.
Of course, you could do the same thing with node and web sockets yourself but Meteor JS made it easier for me to get started.
I’m not currently using any client side framework like React or Vue (although both work great in Meteor JS) because I render everything client side in the Canvas tag.
In the future, will probably be moving to the Lance real time JS engine and Pixie for WebGL tendering.
There has been a multiplayer websocket .io game renaissance ongoing since 2016. Hundreds of multiplayer websocket games have been released in that time and they’re all objectively better than this, tech stack included. People like you are acting like this never happened, and I don’t know how you could actually be unaware of it. Some multiplayer websocket games such as slither.io are a worldwide phenomenon on par with Pokémon Go in terms of popularity.
In light of all that, I’m asking why you think this is cool because it doesn’t make sense to me.
It does have client side prediction. What it is lacking is a working sync when the updates come back from the server.
I’ve tried and tried to get that part right but it has been difficult.
I recently found the Lance engine and may just port to that since they seem to have figured it out.
You can follow my progress at: https://blog.spacefrigates.com
You can follow along with my progress at: https://blog.spacefrigates.com