Ambient: The Multiplayer Game Engine
ambient.run
Ambient: The Multiplayer Game Engine
1–10 of 148 posts
Re: Ambient: The Multiplayer Game Engine
#2I wonder how it can scale?
Even with the battle royale craze, it seems like nothing has really replicated Planetside 2's black magic netcode (or at least amassed a playerbase big enough to show it off).
Re: Ambient: The Multiplayer Game Engine
#3Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34894922
Re: Ambient: The Multiplayer Game Engine
#4Always good to see more game engines coming out. Might I make a suggestion though. For your hero video on the site, I would expect it to be showing off the multiplayer aspect of the engine. Rendering environments, even in extreme detail, is considered table stakes for a game engine. Show off your unique selling point, making multiplayer games much easier than with a different engine.
Re: Ambient: The Multiplayer Game Engine
#5"Why not Rust?" is a question I ask about game development a lot these days.
I'm an engineer with a decade of experience as a web services engineer, and 5 years of game development engineering. Rust seems like the right direction for game developers -- safer code, faster compile times, more portable binaries.
Ambient looks very cool, but I had some questions --
1) WebAssembly, but no native web player? One of the most powerful things a game dev can do is provide a link to a game and just let people play it on itch or other space. Having a binary you have to download to play is a major turn off for small time games. It looks like it's on the roadmap, but without a clear target?
2) No editor/tooling yet? What's the plan for a unity-like editor interface? How do non-developers (designers, artists, audio folks) interact with a game made with ambient? Is that in the plans for the future? Could you expand on it a bit more?
3) Sustainability? A five person crew working on a free product, how do you plan on monetizing it?
4) Single executable? One concern that jumps out right away is the single executable for server and client. Often in multiplayer games you want to avoid shipping server binaries (for cheat protection, for instance, or to avoid the cost of deploying a large client to a headless server environment). Are there plans to provide the ability to separate client and server builds?
5) HTML for front end? Games are increasingly moving to HTML to power their UI. Given you are already using WebAssembly, it seems like it wouldn't be that far off to enable an interface so that UI could be handled in JS/HTML. (Yes, this is performant enough for games. Yes, it's being done in AAA games. No, you aren't the first commenter who thinks that UI shouldn't be done in HTML. No, I'm not interested in hearing complaints about it.)
Nevertheless, this looks neat,
Re: Ambient: The Multiplayer Game Engine
#6"the multiplayer game engine"
Yet I can't find any mention of multilayer in the documentation. The github mentions it offers synchronization of data, but what about things like rollback, interpolation, exterpolation, VoIP, messaging, P2P, load balancing, autoscaling, measuring latency, persistence, etc that are needed for multilayer games?
Re: Ambient: The Multiplayer Game Engine
#7Engines that reached escape velocity often did so by having usable artist tools and [...] no, that's pretty much the defining factor. Artists used them.
Seeing people in the age of 2 commercial engines (and only one you can reliably ship with...) attempt to challenge architectures the incumbents instilled, knowing the challenge of getting games made with a new engine, gives my cynicism a run for its' money.
Re: Ambient: The Multiplayer Game Engine
#8I wonder how it can scale? Even with the battle royale craze, it seems like nothing has really replicated Planetside 2's black magic netcode (or at least amassed a playerbase big enough to show it off).
> it seems like nothing has really replicated Planetside 2's black magic netcode
Or tried to. From what I’ve read online they massively rely on client-side computation, even for hit detection.
It seems more like trading security for performance than any sort of technical miracle black magic.
Unless I’ve missed something?
Re: Ambient: The Multiplayer Game Engine
#9"Why not Rust?" is a question I ask about game development a lot these days. I'm an engineer with a decade of experience as a web services engineer, and 5 years of game development engineering. Rust seems like the right direction for game developers -- safer code, faster compile times, more portable binaries. Ambient looks very cool, but I had some questions -- 1) WebAssembly, but no native web player? One of the mos…
>1) WebAssembly, but no native web player? One of the most powerful things a game dev can do is provide a link to a game and just let people play it on itch or other space. Having a binary you have to download to play is a major turn off for small time games. It looks like it's on the roadmap, but without a clear target?
Appstores, antiviruses and gatekeepers of every sort. Employees want to play games without installing.
>HTML...
The problem is with CSS and the ever evolving HTML standard. Feels a bit heavy and the implemented features will always be incomplete.
Re: Ambient: The Multiplayer Game Engine
#10"Why not Rust?" is a question I ask about game development a lot these days. I'm an engineer with a decade of experience as a web services engineer, and 5 years of game development engineering. Rust seems like the right direction for game developers -- safer code, faster compile times, more portable binaries. Ambient looks very cool, but I had some questions -- 1) WebAssembly, but no native web player? One of the mos…
>1) WebAssembly, but no native web player? One of the most powerful things a game dev can do is provide a link to a game and just let people play it on itch or other space. Having a binary you have to download to play is a major turn off for small time games. It looks like it's on the roadmap, but without a clear target? Appstores, antiviruses and gatekeepers of every sort. Employees want to play games without instal…
Steam and the app stores seem to be doing just fine. Maybe there's a popular indie title only released for browsers but I can't think of it.