Show HN: Skycraft, a creative voxel adventure game in WebGL | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Skycraft, a creative voxel adventure game in WebGL

skycraft.io

23 pointshaeric18 comments

Your game is extremely promising, how do you want to implement multiplayer gaming technically? Does it have to run over your servers or is it in a peer to peer fashion or will users be able to have their own servers?

And very important, how do you think about open source, self hosting and customization?

Glad you see the potential! :)

I have only done a few tests yet with multiplayer, but as long as WebRTC doesn't stumble on any security hiccups (like Websockets did in its infancy), it will most likely be p2p multiplayer with a framework called peer.js (http://peerjs.com/), which uses WebRTC.

So for the actual multiplayer-part, there isn't really any reason to have servers, other than to negotiate the WebRTC connection. But blocks have to be saved somewhere, and thus, at least one (possibly all) of the players have to be connected to a server to send block changes. And of course you need a server to actually load the html, javascript and original blocks from.

So you need some kind of server for each world, as a place to save blocks. Initially, these servers will be on skycraft.io, where you can play with a certain number of friends for free. But in the future it would be really, really cool to allow players to mod the game, and let them host their servers on their own domains as well, to allow for modding. I haven't really thought through how to do this the best way though, there are many, many details that have to done correctly for it to work.

Customization/modding is still a bit into the future though, I have to make more of the actual game first! :) All I can really say is that it's definitely in the back of my head, even though I can't promise anything at this point.

That sounds really good! What would be most important to me is that the data of the worlds would be saved on my own server (and I think many others would appreciate this too, espacially as they are used to it from minecraft).

I'll support you and hope that this will be possible. The more backers you have the more you can focus on the game. Make it good! :)

I like the aesthetic of this and the fact that it's based on the open web, though I wish that you invested your time into making more original video games. There aren't enough of those in the world!

Thanks for the encouragement! :)

But about that originality.. Aren't most games really inspired by previous games, iterating on them, remixing in stuff from other games and making them better? Didn't Transport Tycoon get a lot of inspiration from Railroad Tycoon, but still end up a truly great game?

Just like Minecraft built on Infiniminer and gave a new experience, just like Terraria built on Minecraft and gave a new experience, I hope Skycraft will be able to give yet another experience. But until it gets more distinctive features than the technology itself I guess it feels quite unoriginal, yeah, I totally get what you're saying :)

tl;dr: Just wait, it'll get better!

Made my 2 year old laptop scream and then never could load past a black screen

Hum.. Does WebGL stuff otherwise work for you? For instance, does this work? http://threejs.org/examples/webgl_buffergeometry_particles.h... And what OS and browser are you using?

Yes, that link works at 11fps and I'm using Firefox 21

Do you see the cube loading in the beginning? Have you tried restarting your browser? I have seen some random crashes a very few times, where I've had to do that, some times because there has been too many tabs open. There's still a ways to go before WebGL gaming is 100% stable.. but that's also some of the point of doing this project :)

I finally did get it running. Thanks!

Looks great! So fluid; and my Mac didn't even start a fan running it. cool :)

It doesn't? My 13" Macbook certainly fires up the song of its people, but I guess an iMac or 15" / 17" should do a lot better :)

My 15" MBP is screaming, but the game is very very fluid, I'm impressed.

It runs incredibly smooth on my 13" MBA as well.

Looks quite nice. Does this use voxel.js?

Thank you! :) If I had started developing Skycraft in 2013, it might have been voxel.js, but it didn't exist at all a year ago. I could have converted to voxel.js, but chose not to, as I have some things voxel.js doesn't yet (lighting, ambient occlusion), and the whole floaty islands thing allows for some special optimizations that would be hard to generalize into voxel.js. So it's just "normal" Three.js., but I really like the voxel.js project!

Accept bitcoins?

Hum, I'll think about it if I hear it from a few more people! :)

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