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Show HN: Server-rendered multiplayer games with Lua (no client code)

cleoselene.com

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Show HN: Server-rendered multiplayer games with Lua (no client code)

#1

Post by brunovcosta »

Hey folks — here’s a small experiment I hacked together over the weekend:

https://cleoselene.com/

In short, it’s a way to build multiplayer games with no client-side game logic. Everything is rendered on the server, and the game itself is written as simple Lua scripts.

I built this to explore a few gamedev ideas I’ve been thinking about while working on Abstra: - Writing multiplayer games as if they were single-player (no client/server complexity) - Streaming game primitives instead of pixels, which should be much lighter - Server-side rendering makes cheating basically impossible - Game secrets never leave the server

This isn’t meant to be a commercial project — it’s just for fun and experimentation for now.

If you want to try it out, grab a few friends and play here: https://cleoselene.com/astro-maze/

Show HN: Server-rendered multiplayer games with Lua (no client code)
cleoselene.com

Re: Show HN: Server-rendered multiplayer games with Lua (no client code)

#7

Post by cmrdporcupine »

"We stream drawing primitives instead of heavy pixels or complex state objects."

This is cool ... but I suspect just pushing video frames like Stadia etc did is just as efficient these days and a lot less complicated to implement and no special client really needed. Decent compression, and hardware decode on almost every machine, hardware encode possible on the server side, and excellent browser support.

Re: Show HN: Server-rendered multiplayer games with Lua (no client code)

#8

Post by kibbi »

brunovcosta wrote: post #6
duduzeta wrote: post #4

Cool!! I'm trying to test here, but other ships keep attacking me and I don't know how to shoot :s

Amazing! hahaha.. Tip: Arrows + Z (shoot)

In my case, Z for shooting works only rarely. Usually nothing happens. How does the game code query the key?

Re: Show HN: Server-rendered multiplayer games with Lua (no client code)

#9

Post by fionic »

Cool! Besides the productizing or making a framework, I’m trying to understand if this is different than the elementary idea (which probably every game dev who worked on game networking has tinkered with) of sending inputs to the server and then sending player positions back to all the clients…? I think even smaller footprint would be position: two or three floats x,y(,z) instead of shapes too? Anyway this is always fine for very low latency environments where client side prediction, lag comp etc would not be required. Thanks for sharing, I might give it a try! sorry if I’m missing something.

Re: Show HN: Server-rendered multiplayer games with Lua (no client code)

#10

Post by kibbi »

Interesting approach! I've thought about a similar method after reading about the PLATO platform.

When playing astro‑maze, the delay is noticeable, and in a 2D action game such delays are especially apparent. Games that don’t rely on tight real‑time input might perform better. (I'm connecting from Europe, though.)

If you add support for drawing from images (such as spritesheets or tilesheets) in the future, and the client stores those images and sounds locally, the entire screen could be drawn from these assets, so no pixel data would need to be transferred, only commands like "draw tile 56 at position (x, y)."

(By the way, opening abstra.io in a German-language browser leads to https://www.abstra.io/deundefined which shows a 404 error.)

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