A multiplayer Tron-like game with curves | Hacker News Reader

A multiplayer Tron-like game with curves

curvytron.com

212 pointstestcross98 comments

Open articleView on HN

It's open source; somebody install it on another server so we can actually play...

https://github.com/Elao/curvytron

Manually compensating for lags is still interesting :)

I installed it but I get 404 on /js/dependencies.js. I'm not experienced with node.js and the like, what can I do?

Did you follow the installation doc?

If you need any help don't hesitate to contact the team :)

I followed the installation doc, everything seems fine and the server starts (node bin/curvytron.js).

When I access the server I get an error page. I looked at the browser log and it shows 404 for /js/dependencies.js.

I thought it was because I set it up behind apache but wget localhost:curvy_port/js/dependencies.js also yields 404.

I don't exactly know how to contact the team about this since I can't say it's a bug so I thought opening a github issue about it would be bad form.

Did you run these 3 commands? - npm install - bower install - gulp

Can you check if the file web/js/dependencies.js exists in the game folder?

OK, there are no errors now but I still get the error. Does it use some other port? Do I need to open one?

OK. I see it opens a websocket which I guess I need to also forward to my server.

There is no mention of bower install in the install doc. I'll try that

And now it's github being down !

holy crap - we killed github.

Hi guys, the server is fixed ... for now ;) Thanks for all the feedbacks, you guys are awesome. We'll be working hard on the majors problems you observed: - Where am I? - Background colored player - Crashes!

Thank you all again.

So much fun! And the random music is fun too.

Have 2-second pause of the movement of my guy as a power up that can be executed by the space bar

That wouldn't work because it would introduce a new key. Also every power-up takes effect immediately, this would break the consistency.

@developers

This is a bug on firefox, sometimes the dotted border from the remove wall power-up doesn't disappear giving the impression that the power-up is still active, thus killing players

Just wanted to say it is great, don't pay attention to the negative non-constructive comments !

very nice.

suggestions:

1 - a stronger indicator of which point is you (the arrow at the beginning is not enough)

2 - control instructions (it wasn't obvious you had to use the keyboard arrows, also because of (1).

3 - if the room is crowded, the game will never start as long people keep joining. Put a timer or similar.

4 - i've seen some 90 degrees turns, probably because of lag or similar. it is probably a bug you may want to take a look to.

Other than that, congratulations!

90 degree turns is a power up :)

2 - the "pick a username and color" dialog clearly shows the controls and asks if you want to change them already?

the arrow is enough

also: let our direction arrow visible while playing (or draw a small car), It will be easier to predict our trajectory.

Me and my friends loved playing "Achtung, die Kurve!", this is definitely one of the better remakes. It can get a little laggy from time to time, but I'm sure you're already aware of that.

This really, really needs a button for the room controller to lock it against new players. Busy rooms end up as an alternative 'game' of whack-a-mole trying to kick all the new arrivals so the game can begin

This seems to be a laggier, CPU-exhausting shameless copy of Curve Fever: http://curvefever.com/play2.php

Because it doesn't have ads.

Wow the ad auto pauses everytime i switch away. That's annoying.

"An error has occurred"

Ah, they finally renamed the not so roll-off-your-tonguey "Auchtung die kurve".

I don't like this assumption of copying. I've been writing multiplayer tron-like games as a "hello-world" style programming exercise for 20 years now and have done numerous variations including curves, and wiimotes and the like. I don't think there's sufficient novel content in curvefever (well executed as it is) to really be accusing anyone of shamelessly copying it.

Yea, but this one has more similarities than just being another tron-like game: all the items that can be picked up is the same, the ability to add local player and the arrow that marks you at the start is the same. It's not a big deal since it's free and open-source.

Maybe strip it down to just two colors: green for you, red for all enemies.

That should be a toggle option.

Nice, finally a way to play http://curvefever.com without the need for flash.

If you manage to get on a proper server without crashing.

And watching http://curvefever.com/content/team-iloveyou-wins-april-2v2-t... pretty much puts the rest the thought of me ever being good with this game.

Great fun, just prevent people from choosing the same color as the grey background -- can be hard to see!

Half the battle is coming to terms with the controls.

If you wanted to make it easier to use (i.e. if it's not part of the charm that it's hard to control, like QWOP), you could go with "click and hold where you want to turn towards".

(One of the nice things about turn-towards-click is that it's very resilient against lag. If the command occurs a bit late, you turn a bit more; compensating automatically.)

It would be nice if there were some indicator to where I start. Many colors look the same, and I have trouble finding my "lightcycle".

There's an arrow next to your dot.

Dude whatever to all the negative comments. This is pretty awesome. Even though the game is simple and has been done before this is a super super well polished implementation with enough unique twists on the idea to make it fresh. You've also given credit to your inspiration which is cool.

Great job!

What exactly are these "unique twists"?

Fantastic, brought up memories of hours of Armagetron.

I came here to mention Armagetron, too. No other game stole my time quite like Armagetron did. If you many people out there want something new to try, give Armagetron a chance, you won't regret it!

Every time I am reminded of Armagetron I hear that low buzz sound of the lightcycles in my head. Right back in the saddle. Capture the flag Armagetron is awesome, going to have to reinstall it now!

This is amazing, not sure why it doesn't have more upvotes, or more positive comments. Classic HN, I guess.

For all the people who are commenting that it's a copy of something else -- get over yourselves, just about everything is a copy of something else (or a combination of things that already existed).

Love the dead simple intro page and room joining/spectating ease.

Glad the web has come this far.

While I'm not going to comment on the programming side of this project[0], I'm going to say that it's very beautiful. Trully.

It runs beautifully on an i386 1.5GHz in surf browser. :)

/request_mode on mode with 90 degree turns. _Exactly_ like Tron. :p /request_mode off

[0]: just because I only want to experience this from a purely user perspective and I'm enjoying it.

Thanks!

edited: format

Reminds me of pizzaworm with multiplayer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhIrgtLcW1o) The UI and multiplayer implementations are very nice, the game could use some more polish.

This is like waiting for people to click "ACCEPT" in a Counter Strike: GO match.

@developers

Players are choosing the color of the background, thus making them invisible. Please fix this.

It might be interesting if choosing a "background" color was legal, but caused random unexpected penalties.

Just keep the background black and prevent from choosing too dark colors.

It's as hard for the person with the dark colour as it is for everyone else. Most people are reasonable if you ask them to change their colour, too.

Otherwise you can kick them between rounds.

Randomising the background colour might work.

Working on it! Thanks for the feedback guys.

Does anyone remember Spin Doctor on the Mac 20 years ago? I'd love to see that again.

EDIT: It's available on iOS! http://spindoctorgame.com/

If anyone is "cheating" by setting their color to the background color, you can set Game.prototype.backgroundColor to something else in the console. Also a way to see yourself if you are the one cheating ;)

This game is amazing. Having a lot of fun with it. It's damn hard!

(not color-blind friendly)

Was kind of fun the 10 seconds it worked between "SOMETHING WENT WRONG :( You are not connected to the server." messages the several times I tried.

If you put your color as something invalid, you appear as random colors from other players on your screen

but to other players you're almost invisible black.

join my clan, team tryhard

Connecting... Something went wrong :(

You are not connected to the server.

Somewhat of a cheat I've seen, someone using a color very close to that of the background. Or is the color auto-assigned?

You can change it manually

It's funny that picking a dark color is pretty advantageous :)

Although I saw some rooms titled "No dark colors" hehe.

Do you really need ready switch? Couldn't you just start after a few seconds having greater than X players?

What's the tech behind this? Meteor?

NodeJs + Websockets: http://www.curvytron.com/#/about

Super fun - but frustrating to get it started - however having as many as 30 players in the room is fun!

Impressed by the UI polish, well done, fun to play, the pwups are great.

only minus is it keeps crashing to home page =(

I'm getting too much latency. I'll start moving left then suddenly it shows me going right.

I feel like a tinier hit box would lead to longer lived trails thus more excitement.

Would be complete for me if i could use the mouse to move it like agar.io does it.

Wow that was fun. I'm tempted to implement a similar version in C.

I saw someone trying to create a client for Curvytron in Qt/C++. At the beginning it was a bot :)

I don't think the repository is still active, but it can be interesting : https://github.com/b-viguier/CurvyBot

ahh, yes the old game Achtung de curve revived as a browser game nice!

I liked cursors.io better.

definitely more creative. This is more satisfying as a player vs. player thing though.

I tried playing once and couldn't tell which line was mine.

The server seems to keep crashing on me. Otherwise, well done.

How is it communicating with the server? Websockets?

Yes! http://www.curvytron.com/#/about

Achtung die Kurve!

Very fun game! I also liked the radio idea.

Guru Meditations 'n' Stuff

Really well done.

What is the backend for this?

Answering my own question:

http://www.curvytron.com/#/about

HTML5, CSS3, Javascript, Node JS, AngularJS, Faye Websocket

Nice

So much fun thanks :D <3

Zatacka!

This was so fun.

Extremely laggy

most addicting game ever.

invisibility: 222222

Crashed

Never got into the game, way too many racists.

This is great but calling it a Tron-like game is just straight up deceiving and makes it sound like "oh, I came with up with this awesome idea based on Tron". If they don't want to mention "Achtung, die Kurve!" they shouldn't use the word "like" at all. Very simple.

http://www.curvytron.com/#/about "INSPIRED BY"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com