81–90 of 102 posts
Cool demo, well polished. Now it only needs some gameplay! I could imagine a friendly MMO game where you trade resources with other sea villages.
It's not a demo, it's a complete product already being sold. I think it's nice that it isn't a traditional game.
It takes about 90 seconds to load for me, but once it does, it's buttery smooth on my M1 Pro. Unity's web story is still so bad for many reasons, but the initial load times are a huge one (~15MB of wasm for an empty scene last I checked). They were working on Project Tiny[0] to address exactly this, but they've now paused work on it indefinitely :( Someone please build tools to fix this! [0] https://unity.com/solutio…
PlayCanvas[0] is the probably the closest "web-first" solution compared to Unity. Used by lots of Snap Games & Instant Games. It's written in JS which means that it's way smaller ~350kB for an empty scene if I recall. [0] https://playcanvas.com
There's nothing inherently large about WebAssembly, it's just that most practical wasm demos bundle emscripten (essentially an entire OS's standard library) or another very heavy layer in order to interop between the JS and WASM world.
As a bit of an experiment to see how small wasm could practically be with a minimal interop layer, I built this little project - the web demo is 90KB of JS + 70KB of wasm:
https://github.com/jordwest/cavernos
It was heavily inspired by this article which manages even smaller builds:
http://cliffle.com/blog/bare-metal-wasm/
There's a lot of room for improvement in terms of size optimisation in most projects, but it's still early days and for now most of them just bundle an OS compatibility layer to get things working quickly.
I'm actually procrastinating on HN from working on a GPU parallelised version that can generate millions of positions every frame. In Townscaper you can actually see that the algorithm runs quite slow and lags behind the players input, there's just a bunch of animation to hide it. I'm hoping to eventually get a version that can run in log2(mapsize) time.
[0]http://oskarstalberg.com/game/wave/wave.html [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SuvO4Gi7uY
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not a demo, it's a complete product already being sold. I think it's nice that it isn't a traditional game.
I'm not a casual gamer so I think it's too simple. One should not however underestimate the casual gaming market, as it is huge.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not a demo, it's a complete product already being sold. I think it's nice that it isn't a traditional game.
I'm not a casual gamer so I think it's too simple. One should not however underestimate the casual gaming market, as it is huge.
I think it's not really a game and maybe calling it that sets unrealistic expectations. A toy? An experience?
I love things like this and wish there were more. I'm not a casual gamer and I'm not often a non-casual gamer (long periods of addiction to Minecraft, Skyrim and a few others not withstanding)
Maybe it's why I love PC VR which many "true gamers" complain is lacking in games. It's full of crazy, weird stuff and I love it.
What determines which surfaces you can build on and which you can't? It seems random — I can keep clicking on an end wall to extend the building for a while, and then suddenly I can't anymore.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm, how? All I see is stilts (in the browser version, at least, which I imagine should be the same as the Steam version).
https://oskarstalberg.com/Townscaper/#MzJODmOgd6TMNh6DKtk6nH...
https://oskarstalberg.com/Townscaper/#MzJODmWAdn_ETTo_gSLput...
(and, for posterity's sake, the shape with propellers is a donut).
This uses the "wave function collapse" algorithm. Oskar Stalberg also made a great demo of how it works[0], but it might not make sense just from that. Martin Donald made a really nice youtube video on how it works[1]. The name "wave function collapse" can be off putting but it's pretty straightforward, and an algorithm that can come in handy for many uses both in game development and just general software developmen…