7 ms·

Show HN: Real-time multiplayer games with cubes. Early feedback on dev docs?

149 points by aduermael 6y ago

luadigest 6y ago
Looks incredible, more competition for Roblox and Minecraft is a great thing.
- aduermael 6y ago
  Yes, we believe there’s room for more actors!
andrewmcwatters 6y ago
When I was a teenager(?) at Facepunch Forums, I wrote Half-Life 2: Sandbox as a free and open source competitor to the by-then commercial version of Garry’s Mod. It drove me nuts that GMod multiplayer games were declining rapidly in quality over the years and I wanted my own platform that had faster load times, better out of the box game mode experiences and so on. And I actually did it. Due to some licensing agreement change issues with Valve, I ended up not taking it to the storefront. But prior to that, I didn’t spend enough time marketing the mod anyway. Those who knew about it seemed to pass along some encouraging words, which was nice. These days I work on Planimeter’s Grid Engine instead, and I have the freedom to do new things with it. But of course, new is always hard. Anyway all that to say this reminds me of Minecraft, which is obviously a fun game. And if this has Lua and some proper bindings, it’s gonna be a blast. I’m sure it already is. But it’s hell on earth trying to get people to play a game that is a spiritual derivative—of another well-established game. Have fun developing this. But do it for you. Like I did Half-Life 2: Sandbox for me. All these years later, my mod still runs better than even the latest version of GMod. It does that because I put more care into it. But since the Source SDK 2013 base is frozen in time, and there’s no usable Source 2 SDK, no one plays it. But that’s OK. I had fun. In a similar manner, I sort of wish there would have been someone from the gaming generation before me, maybe a Quakeworld player, who would have passed on the same insight. Projects this large will take years of your life in development time. You only get to work on some many of them. Ask yourself if you want to see yourself working on this in 5-10 years, or a similar title.
- cnity 6y ago
  Wonderful comment, thank you.
- aduermael 6y ago
  Great comment! Thank you! :) We love each day we spend working on this, so yes we definitely see ourselves working on it in 5 - 10 years. ^^ You're right about about the fact it may be hard to sell spiritual derivative at the beginning. We realized many Minecraft players only play for a few weeks when there's a major update (~once a year). Mainly because of the lack of renewed content and the lack of very diverse experiences. This is where Roblox excels. We want Particubes to become an alternative for them, when they're done playing Minecraft and still want to play in a familiar environment where they can interact with everything. We're still big Minecraft fans ourselves (as players and server admins). Particubes is a way to fix some of our own frustrations with it, but will end up being a very different product. Also, sorry to read about the licensing agreement issues with Valve. :( We thought about building a good scripting environment for Minecraft instead of building our own engine, but depending on it felt risky, and since we're in for the long run...
  - andrewmcwatters 6y ago
    I should reiterate that development time cognizance; I mean really think about it. If you're a teenager working on this project, will you still be OK working on it when you're in college? If you're in your college years, will you still be OK working on it when you're in your early marriage and trying to buy a home or start a family? No one really articulates that level of project planning in this space, so let me be the person to mention it. You could be working on updating the user interface while you're asking yourself if you need to really be focusing on this, or finding a new job so that you can afford that engagement ring, or asking yourself what features or bug fixes you need to prioritize in the middle of having your car fixed. You might end up postponing voice chat until the next major release because you can't get a week of time to yourself because Valentine's Day is coming up and you haven't planned how dinner and a movie is going to work with COVID-19 changing what is possible. You know, stuff like that. Because you're definitely going to have full-time affairs while working on this stuff. And don't just focus on the product. So many great developers who have the skill to work on these projects focus 100% of their time on the actual product, which is of course, critical. If you don't have something good, no one will play it. Keep in mind that at some point in time, you'll need a strategy to move from 100% development and documentation to a near minimum 60/40 of product development and marketing. Far in advance, figure out what your penetration strategy is. For example, what forums you need to establish a presence on, what fledgling YouTubers you need to create relationships with, how you incentivize kids to share the game with their friends and what devices they're using. The latter most being perhaps the most difficult space to understand, since I constantly hear no one uses a desktop or laptop anymore. You need to have spreadsheets of this stuff and measure how you're making progress in creating a headspace for your product in people's minds based on their routines of where they go to hang out and what content they consume. Best of luck! You have a great piece of software here, just keep it up. If you want to play it, there's bound to be others who want to, too.
boogies 6y ago
Looks very similar to Minetest (https://www.minetest.net/ https://www.minetest.net/) (Edit: but this is nonfree and hasn’t yet been ported to GNU/Linux, while Minetest has and also works on 3 BSDs). Although Minetest does not include built in tools for asset creation — most models, textures, and scripts seem to be made in Blender, GIMP, and standard text editors — there is a mod to convert in-game builds into models (edit: including textures in the future: https://content.minetest.net/packages/random_geek/meshport/ https://content.minetest.net/packages/random_geek/meshport/ / https://github.com/random-geek/meshport https://github.com/random-geek/meshport) and mesecons’s (https://mesecons.net/ https://mesecons.net/) Luacontroller block allows you to type and run Lua in-game without restarting.
- marcodiego 6y ago
  Exactly. Is there any point where particubes is superior?
  - mlyle 6y ago
    If it really ends up in browser and allows free-form code changes in one page, then there's a huge opportunity for education. I'd do this with my classes.
    - aduermael 6y ago
      Would you say not being in the browser is an important barrier for education? The app is super small (~30MB), runs on all mobile and desktop platforms natively, we even respect all sandboxing requirements to be present on the Mac AppStore. :p We’re also making sure the app runs well on ~4yo devices (including smartphones) That being said, we agree supporting web browsers should be on the roadmap. But we’re a small team, it’s just not a priority currently.
      - yoz-y 6y ago
        From what I understand a lot of educational computers are chromebooks. Being in a browser is definitely a plus.
hazz99 6y ago
This looks... really cool. Good luck! I love the concept of an open game development platform , and especially the automatic multiplayer. I hope this succeeds.
- aduermael 6y ago
  Thank you!
aerovistae 6y ago
Damn I saw the title and thought this would be a solution for easily making realtime multiplayer games, got so excited because it's really very difficult right now. But this is more like roblox or something, not a tool for setting up a realtime server to sync data across clients. Devs out there: if you make something like firebase that lets you realtime sync in-memory server data (instead of db data like firebase) among clients in a cost-efficient way such that it's viable for multiplayer browser games and mobile apps, there are a lot of people who would pay for it. Me most of all. I would pay $100+/mo on a starter plan for it, even before I scaled. You really have to have serious technical chops to do this well right now, and it's a big barrier to entry. The 19yo who wrote Agar.io single-handedly is nothing short of a savant.
- gremlinsinc 6y ago
  Can you explain more on this ? Are you wanting something like a cloud-based ... browser/cache basically a users localstorage/db/browser data would be synched in the same format in the cloud? How are you imagining this? (Burned out dev, looking for a side project).
  - aerovistae 6y ago
    Context: I started building a synced browser game, having never done anything similar before, and realized that multiplayer game state isn't supposed to be stored in a database, the way firebase works. It's just kept in a server's active process memory, so there's no reads/writes to a DB involved. Otherwise realtime speed would be impossible. I never knew this before, having never worked on it or thought about it. But if you want such a setup, you basically have to write it yourself. And that's hard. I just wish there was a SaaS (much like firebase) where you sign up and have an API that lets you define the data that your game-state involves (which may be a large schema), and then provides you with a suite of methods for letting clients create, find, and join group sessions ("games", "matches", however you want to call them) where the game-state is synced across all clients in that session until the game ends, with each client being able to modify the game-state within defined limitations (i.e. play the game.) I suppose the server would have to know under what conditions a game ended so that it could notify all players and end the session. It just seems very daunting to me.
aodj 6y ago
Similar idea to https://dotbigbang.com/ https://dotbigbang.com/ except it's more platform focused and not browser native
- aduermael 6y ago
  It’s not too much work to make it work with wasm, adding web browser support. The app is very small (~30MB), it’s definitely something we want to do in the future. But Linux will be supported before that. Game servers and our CI already run on Linux.
- meheleventyone 6y ago
  I'm part of the dot big bang team and just want to note that we're absolutely a platform. Our aim is to be a place where people can play games but also one where anyone can make games. We're in the process of unlocking the first stage for the gameplay side of that by releasing our TypeScript based scripting API soon. Particubes looks great too and it's cool to see so many companies popping up in this space.
  - aduermael 6y ago
    Oh Hi! :) It's great to know that you're adding scripting to dot big bang!
    - meheleventyone 6y ago
      Thanks, these things are always an entertaining journey! :)
dsrw 6y ago
This is cool. I'm working on something similar called enu (https://github.com/dsrw/enu https://github.com/dsrw/enu), but you're further along than I am. A few suggestions that may or may not be helpful: - I realize that this is a big part of your esthetic, but blocky "game fonts" are hard to read. They're fine for games, but for editing code I want a normal monospace font rendered at a normal DPI. - I feel like there should be a way to apply code changes without a full Publish. It's nice to test a change without resetting the entire world. - Your docs are off to a good start, but it's really not clear to me how everything comes together. A more in depth example would be more helpful at this point than API docs, I think. I'll definitely keep an eye on this. Nice work!

149 points by aduermael 6y ago

luadigest 6y ago

Looks incredible, more competition for Roblox and Minecraft is a great thing.

aduermael 6y ago
Yes, we believe there’s room for more actors!

andrewmcwatters 6y ago

When I was a teenager(?) at Facepunch Forums, I wrote Half-Life 2: Sandbox as a free and open source competitor to the by-then commercial version of Garry’s Mod. It drove me nuts that GMod multiplayer games were declining rapidly in quality over the years and I wanted my own platform that had faster load times, better out of the box game mode experiences and so on. And I actually did it. Due to some licensing agreement change issues with Valve, I ended up not taking it to the storefront. But prior to that, I didn’t spend enough time marketing the mod anyway. Those who knew about it seemed to pass along some encouraging words, which was nice. These days I work on Planimeter’s Grid Engine instead, and I have the freedom to do new things with it. But of course, new is always hard. Anyway all that to say this reminds me of Minecraft, which is obviously a fun game. And if this has Lua and some proper bindings, it’s gonna be a blast. I’m sure it already is. But it’s hell on earth trying to get people to play a game that is a spiritual derivative—of another well-established game. Have fun developing this. But do it for you. Like I did Half-Life 2: Sandbox for me. All these years later, my mod still runs better than even the latest version of GMod. It does that because I put more care into it. But since the Source SDK 2013 base is frozen in time, and there’s no usable Source 2 SDK, no one plays it. But that’s OK. I had fun. In a similar manner, I sort of wish there would have been someone from the gaming generation before me, maybe a Quakeworld player, who would have passed on the same insight. Projects this large will take years of your life in development time. You only get to work on some many of them. Ask yourself if you want to see yourself working on this in 5-10 years, or a similar title.

cnity 6y ago
Wonderful comment, thank you.
aduermael 6y ago
Great comment! Thank you! :) We love each day we spend working on this, so yes we definitely see ourselves working on it in 5 - 10 years. ^^ You're right about about the fact it may be hard to sell spiritual derivative at the beginning. We realized many Minecraft players only play for a few weeks when there's a major update (~once a year). Mainly because of the lack of renewed content and the lack of very diverse experiences. This is where Roblox excels. We want Particubes to become an alternative for them, when they're done playing Minecraft and still want to play in a familiar environment where they can interact with everything. We're still big Minecraft fans ourselves (as players and server admins). Particubes is a way to fix some of our own frustrations with it, but will end up being a very different product. Also, sorry to read about the licensing agreement issues with Valve. :( We thought about building a good scripting environment for Minecraft instead of building our own engine, but depending on it felt risky, and since we're in for the long run...
- andrewmcwatters 6y ago
  I should reiterate that development time cognizance; I mean really think about it. If you're a teenager working on this project, will you still be OK working on it when you're in college? If you're in your college years, will you still be OK working on it when you're in your early marriage and trying to buy a home or start a family? No one really articulates that level of project planning in this space, so let me be the person to mention it. You could be working on updating the user interface while you're asking yourself if you need to really be focusing on this, or finding a new job so that you can afford that engagement ring, or asking yourself what features or bug fixes you need to prioritize in the middle of having your car fixed. You might end up postponing voice chat until the next major release because you can't get a week of time to yourself because Valentine's Day is coming up and you haven't planned how dinner and a movie is going to work with COVID-19 changing what is possible. You know, stuff like that. Because you're definitely going to have full-time affairs while working on this stuff. And don't just focus on the product. So many great developers who have the skill to work on these projects focus 100% of their time on the actual product, which is of course, critical. If you don't have something good, no one will play it. Keep in mind that at some point in time, you'll need a strategy to move from 100% development and documentation to a near minimum 60/40 of product development and marketing. Far in advance, figure out what your penetration strategy is. For example, what forums you need to establish a presence on, what fledgling YouTubers you need to create relationships with, how you incentivize kids to share the game with their friends and what devices they're using. The latter most being perhaps the most difficult space to understand, since I constantly hear no one uses a desktop or laptop anymore. You need to have spreadsheets of this stuff and measure how you're making progress in creating a headspace for your product in people's minds based on their routines of where they go to hang out and what content they consume. Best of luck! You have a great piece of software here, just keep it up. If you want to play it, there's bound to be others who want to, too.

boogies 6y ago

Looks very similar to Minetest (https://www.minetest.net/ https://www.minetest.net/) (Edit: but this is nonfree and hasn’t yet been ported to GNU/Linux, while Minetest has and also works on 3 BSDs). Although Minetest does not include built in tools for asset creation — most models, textures, and scripts seem to be made in Blender, GIMP, and standard text editors — there is a mod to convert in-game builds into models (edit: including textures in the future: https://content.minetest.net/packages/random_geek/meshport/ https://content.minetest.net/packages/random_geek/meshport/ / https://github.com/random-geek/meshport https://github.com/random-geek/meshport) and mesecons’s (https://mesecons.net/ https://mesecons.net/) Luacontroller block allows you to type and run Lua in-game without restarting.

marcodiego 6y ago
Exactly. Is there any point where particubes is superior?
- mlyle 6y ago
  If it really ends up in browser and allows free-form code changes in one page, then there's a huge opportunity for education. I'd do this with my classes.
  - aduermael 6y ago
    Would you say not being in the browser is an important barrier for education? The app is super small (~30MB), runs on all mobile and desktop platforms natively, we even respect all sandboxing requirements to be present on the Mac AppStore. :p We’re also making sure the app runs well on ~4yo devices (including smartphones) That being said, we agree supporting web browsers should be on the roadmap. But we’re a small team, it’s just not a priority currently.
    - yoz-y 6y ago
      From what I understand a lot of educational computers are chromebooks. Being in a browser is definitely a plus.

hazz99 6y ago

This looks... really cool. Good luck! I love the concept of an open game development platform , and especially the automatic multiplayer. I hope this succeeds.

aduermael 6y ago
Thank you!

aerovistae 6y ago

Damn I saw the title and thought this would be a solution for easily making realtime multiplayer games, got so excited because it's really very difficult right now. But this is more like roblox or something, not a tool for setting up a realtime server to sync data across clients. Devs out there: if you make something like firebase that lets you realtime sync in-memory server data (instead of db data like firebase) among clients in a cost-efficient way such that it's viable for multiplayer browser games and mobile apps, there are a lot of people who would pay for it. Me most of all. I would pay $100+/mo on a starter plan for it, even before I scaled. You really have to have serious technical chops to do this well right now, and it's a big barrier to entry. The 19yo who wrote Agar.io single-handedly is nothing short of a savant.

gremlinsinc 6y ago
Can you explain more on this ? Are you wanting something like a cloud-based ... browser/cache basically a users localstorage/db/browser data would be synched in the same format in the cloud? How are you imagining this? (Burned out dev, looking for a side project).
- aerovistae 6y ago
  Context: I started building a synced browser game, having never done anything similar before, and realized that multiplayer game state isn't supposed to be stored in a database, the way firebase works. It's just kept in a server's active process memory, so there's no reads/writes to a DB involved. Otherwise realtime speed would be impossible. I never knew this before, having never worked on it or thought about it. But if you want such a setup, you basically have to write it yourself. And that's hard. I just wish there was a SaaS (much like firebase) where you sign up and have an API that lets you define the data that your game-state involves (which may be a large schema), and then provides you with a suite of methods for letting clients create, find, and join group sessions ("games", "matches", however you want to call them) where the game-state is synced across all clients in that session until the game ends, with each client being able to modify the game-state within defined limitations (i.e. play the game.) I suppose the server would have to know under what conditions a game ended so that it could notify all players and end the session. It just seems very daunting to me.

aodj 6y ago

Similar idea to https://dotbigbang.com/ https://dotbigbang.com/ except it's more platform focused and not browser native

aduermael 6y ago
It’s not too much work to make it work with wasm, adding web browser support. The app is very small (~30MB), it’s definitely something we want to do in the future. But Linux will be supported before that. Game servers and our CI already run on Linux.
meheleventyone 6y ago
I'm part of the dot big bang team and just want to note that we're absolutely a platform. Our aim is to be a place where people can play games but also one where anyone can make games. We're in the process of unlocking the first stage for the gameplay side of that by releasing our TypeScript based scripting API soon. Particubes looks great too and it's cool to see so many companies popping up in this space.
- aduermael 6y ago
  Oh Hi! :) It's great to know that you're adding scripting to dot big bang!
  - meheleventyone 6y ago
    Thanks, these things are always an entertaining journey! :)

dsrw 6y ago

This is cool. I'm working on something similar called enu (https://github.com/dsrw/enu https://github.com/dsrw/enu), but you're further along than I am. A few suggestions that may or may not be helpful: - I realize that this is a big part of your esthetic, but blocky "game fonts" are hard to read. They're fine for games, but for editing code I want a normal monospace font rendered at a normal DPI. - I feel like there should be a way to apply code changes without a full Publish. It's nice to test a change without resetting the entire world. - Your docs are off to a good start, but it's really not clear to me how everything comes together. A more in depth example would be more helpful at this point than API docs, I think. I'll definitely keep an eye on this. Nice work!