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Show HN: I built a multiplayer voxel browser game engine

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Re: Show HN: I built a multiplayer voxel browser game engine

#11

Post by crazygringo »

drusepth wrote: post #4
bee_rider wrote: post #3

It was an interesting read. I don’t really have anything to add, but wanted to kick off a pedantry argument here. > I wanted to recreate a canceled MMO called Exteel in an .io style. I think it should be “a .io style,” since the next letter pronounced is d.

Pedantry activated: in my game dev circles, I've only ever heard .io pronounced "dot i-o" when talking about itch.io. The style, however, I usually hear as "i-o style" or an "i-o game".

Interesting -- if I see "open a .jpg file" I never hear people pronounce the dot, it's "open a jay-peg file". You'd definitely say "open an .exe file", again because no "dot".

On the other hand, "Microsoft .NET" includes the "dot", as well as "bought five .com domains". Yet in contrast, "bought five .edu domains" would usually be said without the dot.

Hypothesis: we don't pronounce leading dots unless for some reason they've become part of well-known "branding", like .NET or .com.

Re: Show HN: I built a multiplayer voxel browser game engine

#14

Post by ironbound »

iercan wrote: post #7

Cool project, when you add multiplayer to a simple game without any game engine and want to actually do it right (CSP, interpolation, lag compensation) it gets technical really fast I spent months trying to make a CS like in Three.js, then I was wondering myself if it was actually worth it I could just have used a random game engine that can export to WebGL with wasm even if the first loading was bigger, people would…

Could check this out https://github.com/hexops/mach-gpu

Re: Show HN: I built a multiplayer voxel browser game engine

#15

Post by Vekz »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #10

Not sure if they still are, but the folks over at DotBigBang were looking for a graphics engineer recently. I don't know how much experience overlap you have with that role, but given your interest here, they might want to hear from you. They're great people :)

Thank you. Great idea.

Re: Show HN: I built a multiplayer voxel browser game engine

#18

Post by bee_rider »

WhereIsTheTruth wrote: post #6
bee_rider wrote: post #3

It was an interesting read. I don’t really have anything to add, but wanted to kick off a pedantry argument here. > I wanted to recreate a canceled MMO called Exteel in an .io style. I think it should be “a .io style,” since the next letter pronounced is d.

Every gamedev's dream, to make their MMO, then they start to make an MMO and they realize it was a mistake.. :p

They probably give up when they realize they have to make a MMO, because the first M comes from Massive (a consonant sound).

Re: Show HN: I built a multiplayer voxel browser game engine

#19

Post by EarthLaunch »

This is amazing! I read everything. I completely agree about the state of the 'big three' engines.

> My focus is still on browser multiplayer experiences.

Here's mine: earth.suncapped.com (https://github.com/Suncapped/babs)

It's been ongoing for 12 years, with several burnouts and rewrites, hah.

If you want, I would love to talk offline (email in profile) about player-freedom, MMO projects, and browser games. I feel like some of us have a shared history going back to older MMOs [0] and Flash browser games [1].

On my project, I sneaked past the hard networking problems by settling on tile-based movement. It worked for Ultima Online and I still believe in it. It scales really well. Networking zones measure 1000 x 1000, and tiles are 4 units, so X and Z can each be stored in 1 byte. This also helps with storing and transmitting tons of objects. See the page load time.

Actually, I sneaked past a lot of difficult things, which is what strikes me about your work - you solved hard stuff directly. I haven't tried to integrate skeletal animations into my Blender pipeline yet. Yikes. I barely know how to write cameras, whereas you made a cross-platform one and blogged about it.

> shared client & server game code

How did this one go? I ended up literally doing a `ln` for shared frontend/backend files.

> React+Redux setup was too much performance overhead for the real-time gameplay section.

This is such an interesting aspect of web games: HTML-based UIs. I went with Svelte because I was curious about it. It is SO much easier than doing a game UI yes. But the "line" between web UI and game UI keeps being a problem. For example, when a player drags an object into a UI backpack: That object's graphic needs to change from 3D mesh -> mouse cursor -> png icon. Craziness. I might scupper the whole thing.

A bit of a ramble, but in conclusion, wow!! Thanks for sharing this.

0: UO, Lineage, you said Exteel which I'd like to learn about.

1: (First Earth had a Flash version lol. Also a Babylonjs version.)

Re: Show HN: I built a multiplayer voxel browser game engine

#20

Post by EarthLaunch »

WhereIsTheTruth wrote: post #6
bee_rider wrote: post #3

It was an interesting read. I don’t really have anything to add, but wanted to kick off a pedantry argument here. > I wanted to recreate a canceled MMO called Exteel in an .io style. I think it should be “a .io style,” since the next letter pronounced is d.

Every gamedev's dream, to make their MMO, then they start to make an MMO and they realize it was a mistake.. :p

Or don't ever realize it was a mistake...ahem.

Then it's like Alice in Wonderland.

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