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Show HN: Ballparq – a small PaaS for Godot games
- wastedhours 6y agoLooks really interesting! Tried to sign up for the beta, but the form didn't submit.
- oap_bram 6y agoFixing it right now, gonna add a quick alert when the data submitted! Thanks for letting me know!
- Gollapalli 6y agoThis is awesome, and could actually be a really cool competitor to itch.io if you play it right.
- oap_bram 6y agoThanks! Another guy made a good point about a listing as well, I'll look into that!
- quxpar 6y agoReally interested in the multiplayer functionality, since Unity seems to have made zero progress on the problem in the last 5 years.
- oap_bram 6y agoIt works really well actually, in the backend I compile a server version of a game, which exposes Godot's High Level Multiplayer API. On the other end you just need to connect to that server and it works! Most of the heavy lifting and the conceptual part is actually native Godot!
- freedomben 6y agoDo you know where I could read more about the problems with Unity multiplayer? My brother is investing a lot of time into building a game with Unity and he fully intends it to be multiplayer. I need to warn him if there's something horrible there.
- ShamelessC 6y agoThe creator of Garry's Mod and Rust had a relevant blog post on this recently. There's a section specific to the multiplayer issues. https://garry.tv/unity-2020 https://garry.tv/unity-2020
- imtringued 6y agoIt sounds to me like they are sacrificing backwards compatibility. If you have an existing customer base this is one of the worst decisions you can make. When you release incompatible products you split your customer base along these products and if your newer product isn't sufficiently convincing then instead of gaining customers you will lose your existing ones.
- ShamelessC 6y agoYeah I don't know the whole story but my understanding is that they originally made Unity work pretty well for mobile and 2d single player games so their 3d rendering and multiplayer support sucked. Now they're branching into the AA and AAA realm and they had to forego compatibility with their earlier rendering pipeline and multiplayer library in order to make it work for those use cases.
- freedomben 6y agoThanks, this is helpful. I'll pass it on.
- ShamelessC 6y agoNo problem. Unreal Engine changed their license in January so that they don't take any money until a million dollars so it's definitely worth considering.
- terrycody 6y agoLooks cool, but the market around godot is rather very small now and all the games made on Godot tend to very small, hobby-ish, not very monetization ready, thus make your potential customers are a very minority. Of course someone may want to show case his games and host them on the platform, all in all a cool project and hope one day it takes off!
- oap_bram 6y agoTrue, it's mostly a passion project as well. I've worked with Godot so much and thought this was a missing feature for most non-developer hobbyist that want to make games. My plan was maybe to sponsor some game-jams to get more known. Thanks for the kind words.
- dzonga 6y agonot a game developer, but big-up for the launch. great product. & yeah, the browser distribution mechanism is neat. my advice, have a listing portal - where published games are listed
- oap_bram 6y agoGood idea! Thanks for the kind words!
- nightowl_games 6y ago> Use the high-level Godot Multiplayer API in combination with Websockets and ballparq automatically sets up a multiplayer server in seconds! I doubt this works very well.
- imtringued 6y agoWell, it's still in beta so how would you know? Also, Websockets are a pretty good time saver. They are basically a thin layer on top of TCP that allows you to send packets of arbitrary size whereas TCP only allows you to send a single stream of bytes and you have to do everything yourself.
- TYPE_FASTER 6y agoI'm interested. When I click "Submit" to sign up for the beta, my browser gets a 500 error submitting a post request.
- oap_bram 6y agoOh shucks, I'll look into that, thanks!