Vanar.io – Realtime multiplayer browser game: Agar.io meets Asteroids | Hacker News Reader

Vanar.io – Realtime multiplayer browser game: Agar.io meets Asteroids

vanar.io

106 pointssnowak64 comments

This is pretty fun :) -- the controls are definitely more challenging than Agar.io, which uses the mouse for movement. I would caution the author to be ready for the possibility of a DMCA letter from Minclip [1], the company that now owns the rights to the game and is aggressively attacking all "clones" of the Agar.io game. Vanar.io seems different enough, but the letter has some strong wording such as "The URL is a deliberate attempt to create a false association with the Agario game, take advantage of the goodwill and reputation in the Agario game and divert users of the Agario game to the URL". Discussion and another example is on reddit [2]. So far the only Agar.io clones sent a letter are ones that directly copied and used the javascript code, so hopefully that's not the case here.

[1] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/d028f601f93e201186b4a75b...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Agario/comments/3f7oys/miniclip_sta...

Has miniclip gone after clones that don't use the deobfuscated client source from the original?

Doesn't seem so. I'll update my post wtih proof if they do.

I played the game, got really good at it, and then quit because the company refuses to do anything about the teaming problems associated with FFA and the mind numbing issues with lag. It doesn't surprise me one bit that they are spending their time and efforts trying to attack others while Rome burns.

Honestly, I think the balance needs some serious changes here. Size -> slowness is a strong mechanic for Agar because you have to engulf enemies, but it's not much of a handicap in Vanar.

I'm comfortably sitting on top of the leaderboard gunning down anyone who crosses me, because they can't outrun my bullets and turn speed. The best small players are doing some pretty cool bombing run stuff with guns -> speed -> shield, but it's often not enough. They hit me 1-2 times quite skillfully, and then I clip them once and they die.

edit: Possibly US East just hasn't learned how to dogfight. I restarted a few times and can reliably top the leaderboard in a minute or two.

Too hard to control the ship using the keyboard, mouse movement like in agar would be loads better.

I'd actually prefer if agar had keyboard support

Upvote because a reasonable discussion point, but I deeply disagree. If you want easy control you can already play agario. Having some more complex games is also good.

Yes this is more complex but mouse could have been an option for an easier transition.

In the long term, however, I think that a player who is experienced and used to the keyboard controls would be way better than someone with equal experience (and skill) but used to playing with the mouse.

PEBCAK

I've played a game with similar controls for years so they were a natural fit for me.

I like it. The controls remind me of my X-Pilot days in college. Good times.

It's like Subspace but no-where near as good. And 10 years later.

http://www.getcontinuum.com/

Yes! Thank you!

These controls are almost exactly the same but without the reverse thrust. Have you been playing since the Steam launch? I'm in game a lot, same alias as here if you ever want to chat.

I have been destroying this game for the last two hours. Sitting at 8/9k got boring so I just quit.

And the successor to Subspace, Infantry, which has unfortunately wound up in a black hole.

Oh wow, Infantry.. I remember playing that for a short period. I prefer ARC (Attack Retrieve Capture) - a classic 90's multiplayer ctf game.

I would say Cosmic Rift is more the successor.

I've said for years that a web-based Subspace would kill it.

I actually started working on one using Emscripten. Got as far as being able to fly a ship around in the original maps.

Maybe I should resurrect that attempt.

I would be willing to work on the server side portion of that.

I had one of the largest squads in Subspace back in the day. If you're a fan, you may be interested to know that Continuum actually got Steam green-lighted a bit ago, and as of this month, is now available via steam:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/352700/

Unplayable with non QWERTY keyboards, please don't forget France and Belgium. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AZERTY

It works with the arrow keys for me.

It's not as fun as agar.io in my opinion. The biggest problem is the balance in this game: in agar.io big players are discouraged from attacking small players, they're too slow to catch them and the risk of splitting is not worth it. It's incredibly easy to attack a smaller ship in this game and there is no risk.

The mutual destruction in this game is an annoying mechanic in this game, yet you keep shooting at players with a similar size as there is a chance they wont react quickly enough.

It looks incredibly cool, but it needs some more balancing to be as fun as agar.io.

"Y U Block ads"? I have adblock on by default and I planned to spend a couple of minutes on the page just to see what it was like. I am not going to land on a random page with adblock turned off. If it bothers you so much, find a different revenue source.

I block ads, that's my choice. Sites can choose to nag if ads are blocked, that's their choice. I can enable ads for their site, or I can go elsewhere.

You and I can't make them find a different revenue source.

Interesting game, I'm pretty impressed with how well the Canvas 2D performs here. I tried writing a clone of Gate88 (http://www.queasygames.com/gate88/) for the web four years ago, but even on high end machines it wasn't performant enough. Time to revisit it I think.

You can play what I built here (it's single player against the AI):

http://lucaspiller.github.io/88etag/

The controls are:

Arrows - move

D - Fire

Q - Place turret

W - Place mass driver

Here is the source: https://github.com/lucaspiller/88etag/blob/canvas2d/applicat...

I was impressed by the efficiency of it too, does anyone have any idea how the creator did it?

Try Pixi.js [1] or one of the many frameworks that use Pixi.

It's really high performance (uses Webgl by default and falls back to canvas if its unavailable).

[1]: http://www.pixijs.com/

Was #1 on the Asia server for a couple of hours before quitting: http://imgur.com/LXzwvei,p8wesZU,MsOfwrE

Fun initially, but it does seem far too easy to remain #1, so I lost interest.

You're basically just searching for #2 to try get a huge score. But you're pretty indestructible. I think huge players need to have their attack strength debuffed a bit; you'd probably need to lessen the rate of score decrease to compensate.

Firstly, congrats to the author on launching a nice polished game!

I think what's missing from the experience (compared to Agar.io) is the suspense. In this game, I find myself kinda drifting all over the place (and moving quickly). I'm terrible at other drifty games like Mario Kart, etc, so it could just not be as fun because I'm not as good :) But the speed difference definitely contributes to the lack of suspense, which makes it a much less compelling experience for me personally.

Played it for a short while and in contrast to agar.io, I don't see any depth or strategy in the gameplay. You just go around shooting stuff.

What's the strategy in agar.io?

It's actually very strategic. You'll start having "a-HA!" moments after you have wasted quite a bit of time there.

One of the first things I realized is that a very small cell can safely hide near the largest cells in the game. Since the larger a cell, the slower its movement, the small cells can use the larger ones to shield them without risk of being devoured. Kind of a host/parasite relationship. Just eat their scraps until you're large enough to go out on your own.

There are many other little nuances you'll pick up on, but I won't spoil it!

For the few who are used to playing games with keyboards, they will dominate this game.

For the rest of the people, who have spent years in fast-paced FPS games (that strongly use the mouse), the controls will be troublesome and prevent gamer-joy.

Afterall, it may be challenging for the first few times (and possibly fun), but who wants to be the small-fry who gets pwned ALL the time.

So here is my suggestion for alternate controls, for a game where you need to adjust aim rapidly, if you expect hundreds of players in each world:

Mouse = navigation

Mouse right-click/spacebar = shoot

Maybe there should be a constant-speed similar to agar, but if you are keeping the acceleration feature, perhaps you should add braking also, which gives:

a = accelerate

s = brake

d = shield

3 buttons + mouse; seems a lot simpler to me IMO.

I would like to keep playing this, but with these controls, I'd much rather play agar.io, which is simple/easy/fun.

Controls are a little funky, would be nice to have some kind of particle explosion when your ship is destroyed. Probably a little more satisfying than just flipping straight to the "play again" screen.

It is hanging on the loading screen for me

edit: Also, typo in about.txt (vanario.io)

Same here.. Is there any reason why it could fail behind proxy?

same hereeee.. it's just stuck on loading screen

The controls feel frustrating to me, perhaps the mouse would be more fitting to this kind of gameplay.

Fun game.. got to a little over 7k then accidentally hit refresh instead of taking another screenshot http://puu.sh/jkiEJ/fb05f05d1e.png

I would really prefer to use mouse to move around like in Agar

Nice game, except that for me, the lag is terrible. About 700-1000ms.

A lot of big players on it, and impossible to get going because death is almost imminent upon spawning!

Pretty cool. Got to ~2000, but the ship's size was still relatively small. It's hard to dominate in this game though (compared to Agario).

I dominated. Quickly got to first place and soon I was sitting at 8/9k score. When you get that high you have a constant drain on your score at about 25/second.

It got pretty boring as small ships could / would run away and any bigger ships were still much much smaller and I could win just through attrition.

P2P fights are too much a case of "the bigger one wins" IMHO. The ships aren't maneuverable enough given the high rate of fire.

This is pretty cool. Any plans for releasing a blog post about building the game, or even the source?

Not really an answer but the creator of agar.io described succinctly his stack : server in C++ with libuv for the networking.

The stack used is on the about (http://vanar.io/static/1fc701fd042fb05f82ea26624089a4ffdd2f3...):

- NodeJS for web server - C++ for game server - Redis for data storage - Nginx + Varnish for caching and routing - Websockets for client <-> server communication - UglifyJS for source code compression - Planet icons designed by Freepik (http://www.freepik.com)

I have so much delay playing this, its almost impossible to play.

Very intrusive image to tell me ads are not intrusive. Okay.

Don't worry, I thought the same and turned off adblocking and checked again, and the ads are even more intrusive.

There's no such thing as unintrusive ads, anyway. They all add unacceptable amounts of user tracking.

Isn't this actually a business opportunity? Supplying non-animated, non-tracking ads. I also imagine one could allow the publisher to accept params to make the images match the target site's color scheme.

At this point, it's hard to trust any ad provider.

There are boutique ad providers like the Deck which go this route: http://decknetwork.net/

Nice one, might be useful to add keyboard layout options !

Wow. This is the first time i played a really cool and addicting websocket/webgl game. Most games try to be too big for the current state of the platform. This nails it!

Keeps stuttering for me. Otherwise is fun.

i made one too http://armtrak.net

Different screen aspect ratios seem to be an issue? I'm guessing some players can see more of the game board than others.

Awesome! asteroids on socket.io!

the controls though...

would be nice if you could play with only a mouse. that was a huge plus for agar.io

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