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Manyland

manyland.com

421 pointsantoinec108 comments

This is an infinite browser-based mmo universe where everything can be drawn and placed into the world, wiki-style... give us a shout if you need anything! You can also script blocks to have interaction or influence the environment (for instance, here's an adventure: http://manyland.com/newpolis ).

This is beautiful and I love it. I think the 8-bit graphics are definitely appealing to early generation gamers like myself. I don't know if it's my personal bias, but I think the cartoonish simplicity makes it more endearing.

Can I destroy things created by others?

In open areas yes, though please don't :) it's a very open world relying on each of us to do good. (Destructions of established blocks will leave dust that is traced back to you, and allows the undoing of the removal.) You can make a new area though where you can set the permission to you/ you and your friends only, meaning someone won't be able to remove a block there. Created areas with such permissions have another benefit: even your friends can enjoy them as explorers, trying to solve quest puzzles and such. I've made one such area here, for instance, an adventure game: http://manyland.com/newpolis

That's a clever approach (dust trail). How do you reconcile the undoing of the removal with any new structures built in that same location?

If something is placed over it, you can then remove the new block to show the old dust again, so you can undo even then. Dust only shows if the old block is considered established, which looks at ranking and time it was placed. The undo system kind of evolved over time...

Well, that was a silly ending but always fun to team up with some random anon.

Have you looked into implementing some form of AI/bot API or the like? With the major workload being done on the creator/owner side.

See the game security exploits posted upthread.

I started a game, found a unicorn, flew up to a spaceship, flew up to a tiny, floating, green block. When I got out of the spaceship, it flew away! This stranded me on the block. Now I see no way to reset my character, and there is nothing to do but die.

I'm sure this is a fun game, but I only got 4 minutes in before it became totally unplayable. :(

If you open the map, you can teleport anywhere and get back to playing.

Sorry, and also please try going here to see if that solves it -- it should set you to green mountain center: http://manyland.com/3

This is so slow it's unusuable.

I've gotten to http://manyland.com/info-speed-issues every single time.

And yes:

- I'm using Google Chrome

- This is my only tab/window open

- The window is about 25% of the screen size on a 15" rMBP

- I've disabled all extension windows

- I have no anti-virus software (plz don't hack me every1)

Works on my android phone using chrome flawlessly.

On Ubuntu 14.04 I only had to re-size firefox to be smaller and no more speed issues.

Sorry for this! Could you please try running it in a smaller window and see if that helps? If not, could you pls try using Firefox for a quick comparison? If that also doesn't work, please email us at we@manyland.com so we can look at it together.

Saw this posted over on PH and checked it out, extremely impressive game and I'm sure there's a ton of dev time on this. Good job and props to the creators.

I wanted to notify you guys though of some security flaws within the game.

Probably the biggest issue I see is the lack of server side checks against changes coming from the client. I only tested this out on the player object as a PoC, but it only takes changing a variable within the player object to modify things like player speed, mountable craft speed, etc.

For instance, while you obfuscated the name of the player object within the ig.game object, it was easily found by checking for modifications to the health variable, where another function listed it as ig.game.O1376. This name for this player object is also static for every game instance, so it's easily referred to every time.

Once the player object was found, it's easy to modify the variables and the world (server side) accepts it. It was also easy, for the most part, to identify what certain variables did as they were in plain text. To change player jump height for example, all it would take is this piece of JavaScript:

window.ig.game.O1376.altJumpReducedGravityFactor = 0.1;

Now the player can super jump and the server is fine with it (verified by numerous 'holy sh!' and 'wtf!?' comments from other players).

The second thing I see is just obfuscating the code more.

I would suggest first and foremost to do the server side checks. Even if you left all your code in plain text, any modification someone tried to make from the client would be seen, verified, and handled accordingly by the server. Second I would try obfuscating all variable names that you can, especially the class definitions like EntityPlayer. To go further on it, I would have it produce the obfuscated names randomly on each load of the game script so they're not easily referred to.

Just wanted to bring the issue up to you guys after finding it.

Maybe send a private message instead of posting publicly before notifying the owners?

What's PH?

Product Hunt

Thanks for these details! We added a client-side scripting option to specifically increase your jumps, so if you want you can create an Interacting for that. We also added flying mountables, triple jump wearables, parachutes, insta-teleporting, a 100% invincibility armor, and everything one might want to do. When you have a need, we try if possible to make it a feature, by integrating it in the Interacting language. At rank 2, try creating an Interacting block to see some of the things you can do. (If people find someone doing something which somehow ruins things for them, they may flag report a person though.)

Now as far as tweaking things which are harmful to others go, we try to base it on friendship -- so e.g. if you pick up a weapon you can only harm people who friended you (if your friends disagree with being killed, they can unfriend, and unfriended people aren't affected by one's bullets) -- but if you find anything that harms others even when not friended, please give us some time to fix it and disclose it privately to: we@manyland.com (we do have server-side checks for such things, so if something is not working there, we'd really appreciate the tip) We aren't perfect and private disclosure is very much appreciated.

Thanks again! Please let us know via email please if you find anything!

No problem, and yeah I only tested simple player vars like jumping, nothing harm wise that would affect other players. Doing the server side check on that is perfect though, so it's obv you guys are aware of it (thought as much given the level of code).

I'll definitely let you know if I find anything else, was just messing with it for an hour or so today :) I apologize too if you don't want this up here and let me know if you want me to delete it.

Looks like you trust the client on their window.ig.game.O722.rank, which allows people to remove blocks at the center and trap people. Check area 2, I think.

You are right, sorry for that and thanks for the reminder. We just recently changed that conceptually and haven't fully synced it -- for the first year, everyone at any rank was able to edit anywhere in area 1 - 4, even in center. We'll look at it soon, was quite a big wave tonight!

I love it! Lovelovelove!

I thought "what a nice wind sound effect" until I realized it was the CPU fan in my laptop. Heh. But that's not really a big deal, at least for now, and I'm sure you can optimize.

Experiments like this show us that graphics and VFX are overrated. It's true for games, and it's true for movies too. Primer is still one of the best sci-fi flicks I've seen in the last ten years, and they used what looked like surplus air conditioning equipment as props. Sometimes too much FX actually gets in the way of your imagination. When I visit a virtual world, I kind of want it to be unlike the physical.

I tried a Rift the other day too, and that has its appeal as well. But it's a different appeal.

Noticed it was a tad laggy and then tracerouted and found that it's in London and I'm in Southern California. I suppose that's understandable. I guess if things take off you'd be able to geo-locate a bit via other cloud services.

> I thought "what a nice wind sound effect" until I realized it was the CPU fan in my laptop.

hehe... can I say we totally planned for that...

(sorry though! if you were around green mountain, that's actually our busiest area. Hope you stick around with us, and let us know how the upranking to 5 goes, it should be smooth over the coming days, and then you can do everything in the world.)

I became a cat. And I mounted a nyan cat. http://cl.ly/image/2G2X2P3j0C3M

My life is now complete.

Am I the only person who has no idea what's going on here? I'm just walking around picking up stuff and sometimes changing into something else. What else is there to do in this world? Besides building more stuff to wear or throw around that is...

Spent a long time wandering alone and eventually got to a very strange place.. http://i.imgur.com/eNI8Cp2.png

Room of requirement.

An skynet-free registration option would be nice.

[Other dev] I agree! We just recently added login free, but will look again at the login options based on user feedback like this.

I like Mozilla's Persona. I used it for my (now defunct) 2D chatroom.

Persona is also defunct:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7364465

http://identity.mozilla.com/post/78873831485/transitioning-p...

This is fantastic, though I seem to be falling to my death fairly regularly, loading to interlude screen and then clicking to get back. Are there going to be consequences for dying? If not why have the interlude?

Also the falling to death kicks in much faster than I would have expected.

Other than those two, once more a great game. Reminds me of Wyvern (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyvern_(video_game)) in some ways.

Im getting script error as i block google-analytics in my firewall. Is it really needed to play the game?

Oops! Likely related to some event logging experiments that we did. Thanks, we'll fix that. Should definitely not be needed to play the game!

Reminds me of https://bombermine.com.

But for a not a fan of Minecraft like me kinda lacks a purpose.

Impressive demo scene though - making things like that with just some scripts and a browser.

Looks interesting, but it's laggy as hell. Running latest Firefox on a beefy hardware. Got booted off twice already with "you have performance issues" and a suggestion to switch to Chrome (haha). Just FYI.

Sorry for that! Can you please try this area and see if it's better? http://manyland.com/7 There's also some arrow signs leading you to further portals

This one is much, much smoother.

Edit: but I still got kicked off after going through a portal where everything was much slower. Maybe this laptop just isn't powerful enough though.

For the record, I'm experiencing no latency or performance issues when using Chrome.

I'm using Firefox with old hardware and it is working somewhat well.

Why is Chrome haha?

Because in a technical crowd not using Chrome is a conscious choice rather than an oversight due to ignorance.

I'm running Firefox nightly on Linux on a thinkpad x230 and this runs perfectly.

Very cool. This reminds me of Lucasfilm's Habitat, the world's first (?) graphical MMO, from the mid 1980s:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_(video_game)

which incidentally is being restored by booting the original servers found in a collector's basement:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/227045/rebooting_the_w...

Absolutely! I loved Compuserve's Worlds Away back in the 1990s, it's rooted in Habitat, and it was a big inspiration for Manyland. I've never seen Habitat except in trailers, and it looks absolutely amazing... like much else of what Lucasfilm did.

Damn that's nice, what is behind it?? It's quite impressive.

Great! It's html5/ canvas/ JavaScript/ ImpactJS/ websockets, on server nodejs and mongodb.

[Other dev here] - Also redis, haproxy.

Really good job guys. How many hours have you spent on this?

Is this an open-source project?

ImpactJS is not open source, but it is awesome.

It's also not closed in the sense that you cannot hack the hell out of it once you buy a license. The closed part is just so that Dom gets his 99$ license fees (IMO a steal).

Thanks! We worked on this for 2 years by now.

One thing we pondered might be cool for the future is some kind of iframe-sandboxed JavaScript to add object functionality, but already you can add to the functionality using behavior scripts called Interactings. http://manyland.com/info-interacting This is the way you can currently extend the logic, and we're setting most of our Interactings for tutorial purposes and such to 'clonable', meaning you can collect the object and adjust and copy its graphic & code. Take a look at some of the videos on the Interacting help page to get an idea, and please contact us if you have any questions or suggestions!

Would love to see a blog post about the server design.

How many lines of code of each, how many people, how much work on which parts?

I dunno why, because I'm certain I've seen games like this somewhere, but this just seems really cool and sorta inspiring, along the lines of "hey, you can just write code and toss it in a browser and go". (Not to be rude; I'm sure it took a lot of effort.) This is one of the first times I've ever felt this way. Ever since '95, I've never been impressed with a web version of something, because usually it's a weak imitation of a native program. But this just feels like something different.

We're a great community and 2 developers. A lot of work goes into the details (we must have spent over a day just tuning the jump, or the way chat words are floating and such, not to mention the whole architecture Scott has set up), as well as to adjust to what the community is asking for, and new needs we see. It won't surprise you that a lot of the work goes into making things mmo-compatible.

JavaScript/ html5 has pros and cons but one thing that is fun is to be able to quickly release updates, sometimes several times over the course of a day, which will then instantly be visible to everyone in the world (and since we're using a browser wrapper for e.g. the iPad version, it will also be updated across devices).

Very cool. How is input sent to the server? Is it one packet when you press the button down and one packet when you release or constinuously sending packets while you hold the button down?

[Other dev here] - Rather more like the first you mentioned.

They're using WebSockets.

I haven't figured out how to use it yet, but the 2D editor I saw in a video that showed up when I sat on a bench was really cool. Efficient editing of the world around you is a really neat feature to have. I think the Starbound devs have an external tool to do that sort of thing, but having it internal is even better.

You can find the FAQ on the bottom left corner (a button). http://manyland.com/info

Shiny! It's like a mature Club Penguin.

Very cool, but the big test will be how this game handles the inevitable 4chan/something awful/reddit effect with masses and masses of genitalia on screen.

I've seen similar collaborative sites ruined by the above.

This might not break the game but in large enough doses turn off large groups of users.

I get lost and cannot find back people! That's what I don't like about this game.

Can you please try click this link, it puts you back at green mountain center: http://manyland.com/3

love the jump right in and play and along the way watch a youtube demo vid while playing.

Great on-boarding!

Pretty cool, reminds me of games like Furcadia and Graal.

In Furcadia, you're allowed to create and upload your own world with your own scripts, as well as upload your own images and avatars for use in the world.

Graal has player worlds and allows almost the same thing.

Reminds me of Jet Set Willy in both style and the fact that it's also incompletable;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_Set_Willy#Bugs

Surprised no-one has mentioned Glitch or GNE yet - love this kind of thing.

[co dev here] Interesting you mention this. When we saw Glitch closing, while we never had a chance to try it, we did see the amazing community spirit of the Glitchens. For our earliest launch, we invited Glitchens to give Manyland a try, and they built the very first blocks!

Yeah, this definitely reminds me of a lo-fi Glitch.

Seems awesome from what I am seeing so far from just poking around.

Could you add a way to import assets easily so that they can be developed using other tools or imported?

Thank you! Early on, we decided not to include an asset import tool - there were a number of factors, but mainly we wanted to nurture the in-game creativity, and keep a level playing field. We will keep an open mind regarding future direction though!

I have an X on my little hand thing by my name, along with a red question mark. I'm unable to chat or interact with anything in the environment.

(Sorry for that, can you please contact us at we@manyland.com)

I'm confused as to why there would be a Kindle Fire app, but no Android app. Aren't apps for the two platforms nearly identical?

We have the Android version ready, but we are waiting for one final feature: the ability to target Android 4.4.3+ specifically (as it's the first with Canvas hardware acceleration built in the web view, which we need).

Kindle Fire HDX on the other hand, we released through their 'html app' option, meaning we can actually point to manyland.com and don't need to provide a compiled project. Pretty neat from Amazon!

Doesn't seem to work well from a phone or tablet, at least not that I could figure out after a couple minutes trying

Impressive performance on mobile (safari).

Yeah, I was very impressed that it just worked and worked really well on my iPad mini.

Ah I'm stuck in an infinite death loop in the dodgeball room

Edit: it somehow fixed itself and gave me a skateboard

I wonder how many Hiro Protagonists will be running around after this really begins to catch on.

Really cool!

Just a small suggestion: could the sound of forbidden actions be replaced by something smoother?

[Other dev] Thank you! and suggestion noted (you are not the first mention this ;)

This is awesome!

But I got on a horse, flew to the edge and now I'm falling for ever.

Oops. Can you please click this link? It points to green mountain center: http://manyland.com/3 (once you log in you can also make snapshots to later teleport to, or teleport with the map)

Seems to be a pure spam & noise generator. Where do I vote down?

HN is not built to allow downvoting of threads; only posts. If there is a problem with the article it can be flagged for review by the moderators. In this case I think your best bet is to simply not upvote it.

If I had time to play, I would definitely hang out here!

Is this unusably laggy for anyone else? Or just me?

Why is Firefox still to slow to play this?

[Other dev] You can use firefox, but chrome seems to run the game a bit faster. Some of the busy areas have a massive amount of stuff in them, so you might want to try some that are a bit more lightweight (e.g. try manyland.com/5). We are working on improving client performance, so this will get better over time!

[Firefox dev] If you need help tuning, don't forget that we are available over IRC (irc.mozilla.org, #firefox, for instance).

Yeah that would be great, thanks Yoric. (We love Firefox by the way!)

It also works fine in IE 11.

Imagine having a hall where everyone can meet to pitch their startups in front of thousands of other players.

Awesome project. Loved it.

Minecraft 2.0? :)

More like Minecraft 0.5. It looks like a 2D sidescroller from the 1980s.

so perhaps Habbo

It does look a lot like Habbo. I've never actually played Habbo, but I know about it because I track phishing scams. Phishing scams for "Habbo coins" were popular a few years ago. (The good old days, when attacks came from kids in their parents basement, not major intelligence services.)

Nah, that's Terraria. Needs something better than scripts and a browser. Good for a demo though.

My computer cannot handle this.

Mind emailing us so we can look into this? we@manyland.com Please let us know a bit about your system and browser, and the area you were in. Thanks!

Oh, thank you, but don't mind that, my computer has very low memory, but it actually ran pretty well after I commented that after a first impression.

Is there a reason why we often have shitty nondescriptive titles like this? I almost always have to click on every link on the frontpage because it is impossible to predict if I might be interested in the article/webpage behind the title or not :(

Back in "the day" the rules said you couldn't go crazy with editorializing the title, but could improve it so it made sense. That rule disappeared from the guidelines about a year ago(?) and HN seemed to go to a strict "title must be verbatim" approach for a bit.

Now it seems the approach is that mods/people who run HN are the ones who usually improve titles, which I think is a good idea (Techmeme does this), although it's often not for some time after they hit front page too, sadly. Maybe they can give a more official explanation of the policy though.

We need hnify.com, a service to let a user give a title and brief summary for a website, and autocreate a web page with that title/info, for submission to HN.

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