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Bomberman massively multiplayer in HTML5

bombermine.com

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Re: Bomberman massively multiplayer in HTML5

#41

Post by basicallydan »

jader201 wrote: post #29

I upvoted this because it is awesome, and it is, well... Bomberman. But I'm genuinely curious: at what point will we stop being fascinated by what can be done in HTML5, and actually start focusing more on what is actually being done -- regardless of the technology used. Or to put it another way: when will HTML5 games stop feeling like HTML5 games? For example, if this were on a console, I think it would still be cool…

We need to treat HTML5 games like games. We need to market them and release them and form a community around them, and then we need to release updates and make them moddable.

Re: Bomberman massively multiplayer in HTML5

#42

Post by wodow »

Jare wrote: post #37
bayesianhorse wrote: post #27

Actually, this is what I believe is the place of Go (the language) in HTML5 programming. I don't know if this was done with Go on the server side, might as well be node or gevent, but Go would be faster and easier to build a multithreaded game server with.

I agree that Go is a fantastic language for writing servers that need both CPU performance and responsively handle many connections. That said, if you write the server in Node then you can share some of the logic between client and server without having to rewrite in another language. Examples where this comes handy in games: - If the server runs the logic authoritatively, the client can run part of that logic locall…

Do you have any examples of live web-based games that are doing this with Node?

Re: Bomberman massively multiplayer in HTML5

#43

Post by jader201 »

kerno wrote: post #33
jader201 wrote: post #29

I upvoted this because it is awesome, and it is, well... Bomberman. But I'm genuinely curious: at what point will we stop being fascinated by what can be done in HTML5, and actually start focusing more on what is actually being done -- regardless of the technology used. Or to put it another way: when will HTML5 games stop feeling like HTML5 games? For example, if this were on a console, I think it would still be cool…

This is how we get there. HTML5 is pretty fresh and it's games like this that let us understand it's capabilities and to improve upon them. I mean, this is a mini MMO implemented in HTML5. That's a pretty big step forward from Pacman in HTML5 already.

Yeah, I definitely agree that this is a big step from anything I've seen thus far.

This was more to kick off a discussion about "are we there yet?", and if not, what is still missing?

I mean, I know what I think is missing, but I've not tried building HTML5 games to understand if HTML5 is the bottleneck, or if other dependencies are the bottleneck.

Re: Bomberman massively multiplayer in HTML5

#45

Post by jiggy2011 »

dreen wrote: post #40
jiggy2011 wrote: post #32

Oh god, have work to do. Must resist urge to waste entire afternoon.. One thing that always seems to be missing from these web games is support for gamepads for that authentic console experience however.

this is a pc game, and an mmo as well, why would you want to play with a gamepad? besides you could say the same about any pc version of bomberman ever made, i doubt any of them had gamepad support, because people rarely use gamepads on pc.

It's a console game at heart though, my earliest games of bomberman were on the SNES I believe. It just has much better feel on a gamepad. There are also APIs in browsers to support gamepads now.

There are quite a few PC games with gamepad support, about half of the games on my Steam list are playable with a gamepad.

Re: Bomberman massively multiplayer in HTML5

#47

Post by de90 »

shocks wrote: post #20
Drakim wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a problem specific to HTML5. Although it's a lot harder to mess with a binary than some JavaScript, everything that runs on client side is fundamentally compromised and untrustworthy. The trick is to have as many checks and balances on the server side as possible (to prevent walking though walls, warping, etc).

Very true, however I am not aware of a specification that, for example, makes it easy to check the scripts/resources that are being used are the correct ones. Of course any system to do this can be broken, but it strikes me a much bigger problem with Javascript in the browser than a binary. One idea that's just crossed my mind is the idea of serving different Javascript to each client? It could be obfuscated uniquely…

The way you prevent cheating in a game like this is that the game itself runs on the server. The client side is merely showing a representation of the server state. If people want to edit the scripts to show an invalid state who cares. Granted latency becomes a huge challenge, but in a perfect world (no latency) having the scripts on the clients side and having people edit them isn't a big deal

Re: Bomberman massively multiplayer in HTML5

#48

Post by rartichoke »

wodow wrote: post #42
Jare wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that Go is a fantastic language for writing servers that need both CPU performance and responsively handle many connections. That said, if you write the server in Node then you can share some of the logic between client and server without having to rewrite in another language. Examples where this comes handy in games: - If the server runs the logic authoritatively, the client can run part of that logic locall…

Do you have any examples of live web-based games that are doing this with Node?

You might want to look at grits.

It's an open source html5, multi-player PvP, 2D shooter up game with sound, built in match making, auth server and architected by a team of ex-game developers at Google using mostly free tools to create maps, package assets, etc..

Here's the source: http://code.google.com/p/gritsgame/

They are using Node to run the game instances on the server. This is mainly because having identical code paths on both sides is highly beneficial due to how much they need to sync up to protect against cheating and have client side prediction. [Note: this isn't an opinion, I asked this question in their study group and the lead game developer told me that is why they chose Node over Go].

Think about that for a second. They created a presentation at Google I/O for the game, have a course running on Udacity building the game from scratch, have study groups at Google's offices, run the auth server on app engine and they still chose Node to run the game logic on the server instead of Go.

I wish Go could be utilized as game servers because it's clearly going to crunch numbers faster than javascript but it seems like not running JS on the server is a catastrophic mistake for game development where you plan to have the client running it in a browser with JS.

Re: Bomberman massively multiplayer in HTML5

#49

Post by mrspeaker »

jader201 wrote: post #29

I upvoted this because it is awesome, and it is, well... Bomberman. But I'm genuinely curious: at what point will we stop being fascinated by what can be done in HTML5, and actually start focusing more on what is actually being done -- regardless of the technology used. Or to put it another way: when will HTML5 games stop feeling like HTML5 games? For example, if this were on a console, I think it would still be cool…

The medium is just waiting for the game devs now: remember back in 2004 when someone wrote a brilliant pretty-much-exact copy of Lemmings in the browser? Well, it's taken 9 years and the HTML5 buzzword to start getting game devs to start poking round in the space. Now that it's started we can move past all of the basic nostalgic tech demos and start writing some more innovative stuff!

[Edit: it's back online, woo! http://www.elizium.nu/scripts/lemmings/]

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