Show HN: Open Sourcing my HTML5 Multiplayer Game Engine | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Open Sourcing my HTML5 Multiplayer Game Engine

github.com

87 pointsrenownedmedia27 comments

"Emergent Gameplay People eventually start building walls around NPCs. They also build synthetic tiles in patterns to efficiently remove corrupted areas. They also draw penises and destroy each others houses."

lol.

"drawing penises" seems to be the first thing people do for these multi-user apps.

I created a whiteboard built with websockets over a year ago on Hacker News, over 100 people could connect and draw anything they wanted. The screen would clear after 5 minutes. So many penises. I told my girlfriend they were rocket ships, I don't think she bought it.

Your girlfriend didn't recognize penises?

I know we're not supposed to do this here.... this is not reddit etc but... actual lol.

Maybe they are lesbians.

I remember that. So many penises. Funny how, given anonymity, the first thing many people do is every social taboo they can think of. We must be very repressed as a race or something.

Players appear to be unable to say anything but their own name:

http://d.pr/i/P85E

And fixed: https://github.com/tlhunter/Cobalt-Calibur-3/pull/26

Sorry I was stealing your castle. I guess you didn't see me apologize considering chat text doesn't work.

No worries. People overran my castle eventually, so I decided to dive into the codebase.

Which led me to do, among other fun things like give myself immunity to mobs and corruption, pinpoint and fix chat text:

https://github.com/tlhunter/Cobalt-Calibur-3/pull/26

app.environment.corruption = [];

A lack of support for changing keybindings is annoying... (I use dvorak)

other than that, cool!

Seconded. But I gave up complaining about this a long time ago.

Yes. Bind a toggle between dvorak and qwerty, and get to playing. Your trash talking may suffer for a while, but you'll manage.

This. I have a keyboard with a hardware switch for Dvorak/Qwerty, and whenever I'm playing on this keyboard I can't for the life of me type a coherent sentence. Under other circumstances, I can type both on dvorak and qwerty just fine, but not while gaming.

Sounds like an opportunity for a pull request.

+1 for succinct statement of why DVCS are great.

The title is somewhat misleading. It is an HTML5 game that was open-sourced, not specifically a game engine.

I'm not sure I totally follow. Just because HTML5 was used as the "rendering surface" instead of say, a DirectX Window handle, its not a "game engine"?

It may not be a legitimate "rendering engine" but I'd say it sure as hell is a "type of game engine". What exactly makes it not a game engine? Is it because its lacking tools and/or level editors or something? From what I see, it is a proof of concept RPG built on top of an HTML5 RPG game engine.

Having said that though, this seems to have been released rather prematurely. Its extremely rough around the edges and clearly hasn't been tested in every platform and browser.

A game is built on top of a game engine which is in turn built upon an API. So gears of war is a game built on the unreal game engine which is built upon the API of directx or openGL( plus whatever for sound, OS windowing, and input).

In the HTML5 world, impact, construct2, craftyjs, and limejs are all game engines. You use them to make games, rather than writing your own routines to deal with canvas rendering, audio, and input.

I guess coming from the web world I would call those Game Frameworks, not necessarily engines. Just because he hasnt laid out a proper API doesnt make his game "run" (as in engine) any less... its still a working game. And it could be used as the engine to power similar type games, even though time and forethought hasn't been put into making that easy (like in the case of a Framework API). So in my mind its still a game "engine". But I see your point, definitely.

I never really knew "engines" implied API's and abstraction, but I guess that does make sense.

Just the fact that its running in a browser on Webkit kind of implies its an engine of sorts in my mind.

Thats just how my train of thought works when thinking about things in the context of javascript/the web world.

I think the parent commenter's point is that this isn't merely a game engine, it's a game. I was interested because I was curious if I could use this in Ludum Dare[1] next weekend, but it seems that it's not just an engine; separating the engine from the game wouldn't be a simple task.

* [1] http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/

This is pretty neat! For some reason the player sprite doesn't show, but otherwise this is great.

EDIT: seems to throw an error when trying to connect on Chrome Mac OSX Lion.

"Error during WebSocket handshake: 'Connection' header value is not 'Upgrade'"

Works on Safari though.

Very cool! Right now you can still hack yourself into godmode via the console (app.player.god = true, which gives you spawn editing powers, I couldn't help myself from building a little maze in the spawn), but for a work in progress it's very impressive!

Thank you for sharing this. I'm new to HTML/CSS/Javascript entirely and I'm getting into it to make games.

example server: http://zyu.me/

Pretty neat! Looks amateurish but a good platform to start off on

one thing i learned abt making games is to limit the game space, and user input. Foster a healthy community first, then introduce freedom.

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