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Show HN: Angeldust – a fast and efficient video game

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Show HN: Angeldust – a fast and efficient video game

#1

Post by ItsFirefly »

After years of solo development I'm presenting: Angeldust, an omni-compatible action RPG and building game!

Website: http://angeldu.st

My single server hosts 250+K active players in one giant, dynamic fantasy world. Angeldust's game server is pervasively multithreaded, implementing John Carmack's dream of processing an immutable world state each tick.

Both world handling and network traffic routing uses any number of threads. For networking, a typical game session only uses ~3Kbps of bandwidth, enabling decent play even over 2G/EDGE networks.

The client is programmed in C++ with bits of C, Objective-C, Java and PHP. It runs really well on very low-end and obsolete hardware, all the way up to modern systems with fast GPUs.

Angeldust works perfectly on Windows XP+, even without hardware OpenGL; Mac OS X 10.6+, even on the first 2006 32-bit Intel GMA945 MacBook1,1; Linux 64-bit glibc 2.17+; Android v2.2.3+, supporting Bluetooth game controllers; and iOS 6+, though iTunes App Store forces iOS 8+ (any way around this?).

I live stream weekly on YouTube and Twitch, even right now! Come ask me your development questions! I often see developers playing together with their kids.

YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/AngeldustLive

One more thing: the Angeldust website ( https://angeldu.st ) uses plain HTML and CSS to offer interactive, game-related actions. It's fully functional even without JavaScript enabled.

Re: Show HN: Angeldust – a fast and efficient video game

#3

Post by ItsFirefly »

JshWright wrote: post #2

Tried registering, but the password input in the Android app doesn't support pasting text...

Yes, I'm sorry that the UI support on Android is a bit limited. Input support is a bit lowest-common-denominator there to work around keyboard bugs.

Re: Show HN: Angeldust – a fast and efficient video game

#6

Post by monocasa »

mysterydip wrote: post #4

Assuming "works perfectly on XP even without hardware OpenGL" means you have a software renderer as backup, can you explain more about how you get performance out of one on modern OSes (where DOS techniques of direct framebuffer access don't apply)?

Windows XP IIRC shipped with a soft OpenGL that'd look like a hardware version. I imagine they's not doing anything special other than not having requirements that a soft renderer can't fulfill.

Re: Show HN: Angeldust – a fast and efficient video game

#7

Post by ItsFirefly »

monocasa wrote: post #6
mysterydip wrote: post #4

Assuming "works perfectly on XP even without hardware OpenGL" means you have a software renderer as backup, can you explain more about how you get performance out of one on modern OSes (where DOS techniques of direct framebuffer access don't apply)?

Windows XP IIRC shipped with a soft OpenGL that'd look like a hardware version. I imagine they's not doing anything special other than not having requirements that a soft renderer can't fulfill.

Right on. Software OpenGL 1.1 works on XP (and other Windowses) and the render engine falls back to minimal features if it detects this.

Re: Show HN: Angeldust – a fast and efficient video game

#8

Post by suby »

This looks impressive. Can you go into how you implemented the immutable world state each tick a bit more?

I'm developing a game myself, and figuring out a good method of multithreading it took a lot of work. While I am content with the results, I wouldn't say I arrived at a good solution.

It sounds like you went with a purely functional approach? Did you rebuild the entire gamestate each tick, or keep a list of changes you needed to make to the relevant data?

Re: Show HN: Angeldust – a fast and efficient video game

#9

Post by ItsFirefly »

suby wrote: post #8

This looks impressive. Can you go into how you implemented the immutable world state each tick a bit more? I'm developing a game myself, and figuring out a good method of multithreading it took a lot of work. While I am content with the results, I wouldn't say I arrived at a good solution. It sounds like you went with a purely functional approach? Did you rebuild the entire gamestate each tick, or keep a list of chan…

I'll reply more in depth after my livestream, but it's a very good question. You can hop on YouTube right now to discuss it if you want. There's a bit of banter going on, but I might be able to squeeze in some useful replies in between.

Re: Show HN: Angeldust – a fast and efficient video game

#10

Post by matthewcanty »

ItsFirefly wrote: post #3
JshWright wrote: post #2

Tried registering, but the password input in the Android app doesn't support pasting text...

Yes, I'm sorry that the UI support on Android is a bit limited. Input support is a bit lowest-common-denominator there to work around keyboard bugs.

I would also add that I get a little ticked off when I have to adjust my password manager's defaults - in this case reducing from 64 to 32 characters.

In the past I have very-often stopped exploring a new thing at this point but this time I am continuing! Looks great and I also eagerly await more details of it's implementation.

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