Making a Multiplayer 3rd-Person Shooter in HTML5 | Hacker News Reader

Making a Multiplayer 3rd-Person Shooter in HTML5

playcanvas.com

Note that this is very much a tech demo. For those complaining about the qualities as a game, please read the article - this was a fortnight's work for two guys!

Very impressive. WebGL still has more than a few kinks to be worked out with GPU drivers and browser support, but it's increasingly looking to be the future. C'mon Apple, turn it on in IOS Safari! (It's in there, but hidden behind a developer option)

Took something like four minutes to load on a 20mbps connection. Is this normal, or is your site just being hammered? Definitely the longest load I've ever seen for a browser game.

Not sure if it's a mouse lock bug but even when fullscreened with mouse lock on, the input is super glitchy - it seems to randomly ignore my inputs sometimes until I move out of some sort of mouse 'dead zone', and my freedom of movement is pretty limited and there's some weird acceleration.

Camera glitches around like mad when I move too, but I assume that's because the animations aren't being blended.

Text in the score HUD gets highlighted when you move the mouse with the mouse button down, which is kinda weird.

Sorry, we're getting a bit of a battering at the moment. It doesn't usually take that long.

Impressive, but:

1. Needs jump. [0]

2. In firefox 14 on Ubuntu it's a bit shaky.

3. There is no three, damn fine work. Good job. [1]

[0]: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2012/03/borderlands-gun-coll... (Scroll down to the heading: "Disallowing jumping is what Stupid Designers do")

[1]: Okay, so there are some minor things like the inverted mouse scroll, unoptimized spawns, and idling players, but it really is a cool demo.

It's a completely flat tech demo. I don't really think that it needs jump.

worked great in FF 14.0.1! No lag, game loaded in under 30 seconds, with instant reaction to controls. Mouse movements are reversed for up and down. Running into a dummy causes them to move forward and along whatever wall they may hit.

Works good in Chrome, on OSX 10.8 with early 2008 MBP. It does not work - "crashes" with Safari on same machine. (Probably not crashed, but no updates were happening)

Pretty cool.

This is pretty cool. Especially since it's 2 weeks' worth of work by 2 guys. Definitely will be following these guys and their progress...

Was hoping I could try it out behind the corporate firewall seeing as it's in the browser... Guess not...

What port(s) does websockets run on anyways?

Doh, that's my fault, We're connecting to the game server on port 8000. Should be using 80.

loading takes very long - i like the idea of a loading bar going in both directions...

The game is smooth but without mouselock totally unplayable

Looks very impressive!

Mouse movement doesn't work in fullscreen mode though, only outside of fullscreen. Tested on Firefox nightly (17).

Graphics smooth on Chrome/Mac/GTX260. Inverted mouse control is really annoying. Have seen some warping.

This is nice.

It's nearly smooth on my shitty Intel IGP under Chrome.

Still, what's the matter with reversed mouse direction?

The framerate was horrible on my quite new iMac

Hi, can I ask which browser you are using?

The framerate is terrible for me too (looks ~5 FPS), newish MacBook Pro.

MacBook Pro (15-inch, Early 2011)

  Processor  2 GHz Intel Core i7
  Memory  8 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
  Graphics  AMD Radeon HD 6490M 256 MB
  Software  OS X 10.8 (12A269)

  Darwin Kernel Version 12.0.0: Sun Jun 24 23:00:16 PDT 2012; root:xnu-2050.7.9~1/RELEASE_X86_64 x86_64

In both:

  Google Chrome Version 21.0.1180.77 beta
  Mozilla Firefox 14.0.1

Edits: updated formatting and newlines. I don't see an option to enable high performance graphics in Mountain Lion, but I tried disabling auto-switching of graphics and it has the same issue.

Hmm, that seems unusual. I'm running a Late 2008 MBP and I get between 20-40FPS in Chrome and similar in FF. Though my machine has 512MB GPU RAM, so it's possible that you are running out of space for textures. There's still work to do there. :-)

Another thing that might cause problems is the the Energy Saver preferences. You need to ensure that the graphics option is set to Higher Performance. (At least in 10.7 you do)

Same on a previous generation i5 Air. Using Google Chrome v21.0 (as silly as that version number sounds...)

If this is a glimpse of the future - I am happy to stay in the present. I think that it is ridiculous that people are exited or even impressed by something that has been possible of 8 years via flash or silverlight (now JavaFX 2.0).

OHHHH NOOOOOOO a PLUGIN to the browser???? this HTML5 thing is sooo much better because it does not require a plugin. OK better? in what way?

Now instead of having to update that plugin every 2-3 months, you will now be updating your entire browser every 2-3 months and will be benefiting from slower moving, less innovative standards based technology.

Open standards are the communism of the web. They promise to put everyone on a level playing field, but do nothing except hold innovation back. They take the entrepreneurs out of the tech innovation space and force everyone to simply try to hack their 'standard' to try to make possible (or palatable) what can already be done in another technology like Flash, Silverlight or JavaFX 2.0.

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