Am I the only one who immediately thought of this episode of community (Digital Estate Planning)?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= 1fgR7oeIXFA
Launch HN: Gather.Town (YC S19) – Spatial video chat for remote teams
31–40 of 163 posts
Re: Launch HN: Gather.Town (YC S19) – Spatial video chat for remote teams
#32I love the idea! When I tried the official demo, the thing that I immediately noticed is the jagged scrolling movement of the screen when I move around.
I understand the pixel art style (I love it btw) and that the map is actually discrete pieces of tiles instead of fluid/pixels, but it's really visually jarring as I move around. If I move by pressing arrow keys once at a time that's fine, or if I even hold down arrow in one direction that's still okay, but if I move by quickly changing directions (e.g. moving diagonally) it almost hurts my head to look at the screen while my avatar is walking.
Re: Launch HN: Gather.Town (YC S19) – Spatial video chat for remote teams
#33We've used Gather for a few company events and it's been super helpful for recreating as much of an in-person interaction style as possible. It outshines Zoom when you have more than 10 people in the same meeting and in more casual settings. Especially for office cultures that were heavily in-person like ours, it helps bolster the sense of team and collaboration that isn't the same over Slack/Zoom.
Re: Launch HN: Gather.Town (YC S19) – Spatial video chat for remote teams
#34We tried this out for a few social events. It worked pretty well, but the choppy world movement makes me a little sick. :( Any chance of a smooth camera/movement option?
We're actively working on this — I actually have a prototype running on my dev server at the moment:
https://alex.gather.town/app/nO9uzqf6ZhzsXJ68/Grand%20Centra...
^^no guarantees on the stability of this server btw, I use it just to test random stuff so it might go down at any moment!
Re: Launch HN: Gather.Town (YC S19) – Spatial video chat for remote teams
#35Are all of your assets original? The avatars look very suspiciously like the overland trainer sprites from Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire. When I was a kid I made “custom” Pokemon trainer sprites for fun and these look like something I would have made; just take a sprite sheet from spriters resource and edit away...
Re: Launch HN: Gather.Town (YC S19) – Spatial video chat for remote teams
#36What do you mean by 'virtual spaces for social'?
Re: Launch HN: Gather.Town (YC S19) – Spatial video chat for remote teams
#37You've got to implement smooth-movement. I used it for a few minutes and I'm nauseous.
Just lerp from one-square to another over 120ms and ... scratch that, if I had implemented as nice a product as yours, I would just implement click-to-move. So your character smoothly moves to where you clicked (with a touch of A* path-finding).
Only gamer's understand WASD, everyone understand's clicking.
Re: Launch HN: Gather.Town (YC S19) – Spatial video chat for remote teams
#38Aww man, I've been ideating around this exact idea for MSFT teams for a while now. (not like I had any time or buy-in for it) BRILLIANT. There is always a faint sense of jealousy and vindication when I see an idea being executed so close to what a person has been pushing for.
Congrats ! I think you're onto something.
I would readily pay for this if I could get my entire team to adopt it. (which I'd say is nearly impossible)
I might sound like making a deal with the devil, but if you could integrate your service into MSFT teams, you might be able to get a huge user-base quite fast.
Re: Launch HN: Gather.Town (YC S19) – Spatial video chat for remote teams
#39Isn’t this a knockoff of something posted earlier this year?
Re: Launch HN: Gather.Town (YC S19) – Spatial video chat for remote teams
#40Congratulations on the launch! Thoughts on competitors like Gatherly? https://www.gatherly.io/
And High Fidelity: https://www.highfidelity.com/
And Movement: https://www.movement.fm/spaces
And MakeSpace: https://makespace.fun/
And GroupRoom: https://grouproom.io/