10 ms·
Show HN: DotBigBang – Multiplayer game engine with 120fps and 2 second load time
With all the turmoil in the game engine world recently, I thought I'd quickly post to show progress on our game platform dotbigbang.com.
It's a fully integrated game platform where the multiplayer game editor and games all run on the web. You can make multiplayer games and share them with just a link with no setup at all.
Breakdown of major features here: https://twitter.com/bobbydigitales/status/1526470671034818561 https://twitter.com/bobbydigitales/status/152647067103481856...
We have comprehensive docs at http://docs.dotbigbang.com http://docs.dotbigbang.com and a cosy Discord server at https://dotbigbang.com/discord https://dotbigbang.com/discord
All updates are on our blog here: https://blog.dotbigbang.com/ https://blog.dotbigbang.com/
- mentos 3y agoI think the https://www.dotbigbang.com/game https://www.dotbigbang.com/game ‘101 tutorial’ is down?
- NathanFlurry 3y agoLooks like https://dotbigbang.com/game https://dotbigbang.com/game (no www) works
- bobbydigitales 3y agoThanks! Where did you get the original link from?
- endisneigh 3y agoWhat’s the stack look like?
- bobbydigitales 3y agoIt's Python and Go on the backend and TypeScript on the front end :)
- endisneigh 3y agoThe rendering is done entirely in typescript? Very impressive. Great work - I was actually curious about how one could crest something like animal crossing hah
- bobbydigitales 3y agoYes it's all TypeScript and there's still a lot more performance left on the table!
- wg0 3y agoBeauty back and forth you mean. Web assembly? Pricing? Typo: Web assembly
- bobbydigitales 3y agoI don't know if this is a question! If it is, I don't understand, I'm sorry!
- wg0 3y agoYes, it is a question whether the stack includes Web assembly? Also, is there a pricing or business model for the platform/engine?
- bobbydigitales 3y agoWe do use some WASM yes and intend to use more in the future, but the majority of the engine is still TypeScript compiled to Javascript. The pricing model is not yet announced, but it'll be a rev share between the creator of the game and us. More info here: https://developers.dotbigbang.com/ https://developers.dotbigbang.com/
- ambrose2 3y agoWhat is written in Python and what in Go and why?
- Exuma 3y agoHow long did it take to build this, and how many people? My brother was interested in game development and I wanted to send him something inspiring, but not "I will never do this in a million years"
- bobbydigitales 3y agoIt's actually a complete game development platform. The game I posted was made using only the tools available on the website. The game editor is multiplayer and runs in the browser. Overall it took a long time as it's a complete platform, engine, tools and editors, multiplayer system and website! I do free game dev mentoring though and I can be reached at https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@bobbydigitales https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@bobbydigitales
- meheleventyone 3y agoThe game that’s linked was built on dot big bang itself by a team of two developers and one artist with occasional help. The total dev time to make it was about six months, a lot of which was spent refining the game and making sure it was super solid as we launched it with a livestream in front of thousands of people! Games on dot big bang come in a variety of shapes and sizes though. You can make something in a couple of hours or take your time. For some smaller examples: This fun puzzle game was made by one of our community for our summer game jam: https://dotbigbang.com/game/0c4038a5fe064711ba339b1e1c2bbd74/dbb-summer-jam-2023---blockbusters https://dotbigbang.com/game/0c4038a5fe064711ba339b1e1c2bbd74... We also run a weekly scripting challenge in our Discord for tiny experiments on a theme, here’s a pachinko potion mixing game that got made for one: https://dotbigbang.com/game/69153d59db5b45f3aa4485e8af2dafa1/flower-fall---potion-maker?mp=WSC https://dotbigbang.com/game/69153d59db5b45f3aa4485e8af2dafa1...
- readyplayernull 3y agoGreat work Robert!
- bobbydigitales 3y agoThanks!
- bobbydigitales 3y agoWait a second!
- chrisan 3y agoLove the arcade skin :)
- bobbydigitales 3y agoThanks it's one my favorites too!
- nnnnnnnnnnnnn 3y agoThis is like Roblox, right? What are the differences between the two?
- bobbydigitales 3y ago1) You can send a link to anyone and they can play on any device in multiplayer, no install needed. 2) All the tools you need are built in and supported on all platforms (even XBOX!), no separate downloads. Windows, Mac, Linux (including Raspberry Pi), XBOX Series S/X. Android, iOS have a simplified editor. 3) We'll give the majority of revenue to the creator where Roblox take about 86% themselves.
- schemescape 3y agoI assumed this would be unusable on my phone, but it actually works great! And nice work on the load time. Every time a non-photorealistic game takes more than a few seconds to load on my desktop, I get unreasonably annoyed. Note: I don’t think I’d ever want to really play a first person 3D game on my phone, but it’s fun to see that it would be possible.
- bobbydigitales 3y agoThanks! We work hard to make it work well on all our platforms. I can get 120fps on my Samsung Galaxy S23 on simple games! Yes FPS can be a bit hard on mobile devices, but a lot of younger players only play e.g. Minecraft on phones! If you want a 3rd person experience, this is a nice one for an ambient experience: https://dotbigbang.com/game/cab2b545338144d68fb8934801a1cd97/adventure?mp=hn https://dotbigbang.com/game/cab2b545338144d68fb8934801a1cd97... And this is a good 3rd person game: https://dotbigbang.com/game/567aa34f2ee14adbb2cb1ea87cc65eff/chase-heroes?mp=ChaseHeroes https://dotbigbang.com/game/567aa34f2ee14adbb2cb1ea87cc65eff...
- kosolam 3y agoOh so awesome!
- bobbydigitales 3y agoThanks!
- quadcore 3y agoImpressive. I like the 3rd person game better. Both runs fair on my pixel 2.
- bobbydigitales 3y agoThanks!
- anymouse123456 3y ago
- NathanFlurry 3y agoLooks awesome! I worked on Krunker.io a few years back (which had a UGC aspect similar to this), love seeing more people picking up on the < 5s time-to-fun mechanic.
- bobbydigitales 3y agoThanks! Krunker is super awesome! What parts did you work on?
- NathanFlurry 3y agoI was employee #1, worked on basically everything that wasn't actual gameplay (core engine, matchmaking/servers, WASM-based anticheat) and left mid-2020. I work with a lot of non-web games nowadays, but I really miss building for web (esp with WebGPU & WebTransport in the mix now). Hope we cross paths at a conference at some point!
- bobbydigitales 3y agoAh awesome, well well done, it's such an awesome example of what can be done with the web!
- aduermael 3y agoOh, I didn’t know Krunker had a UGC aspect, I need to test this. Super short time-to-fun is really awesome. I’m working on a UGC platform too, and it’s one thing we do consider / try to improve. However, our main point of friction is the sign up process (checking for DOB at least). It’s mandatory when bringing people together (realtime multiplayer), especially with chat features enabled. Has this been considered for Krunker?
- sdwr 3y agoRuns pretty damn smooth on my budget android!
- bobbydigitales 3y agoThanks so much! We work hard to make it run well on lower-spec devices!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- zfxfr 3y agohttp://docs.dotbigbang.com/ http://docs.dotbigbang.com/ gives 403 ERROR The request could not be satisfied.
- bobbydigitales 3y agoThat's super weird! It's working for me here on wifi and on my cell connection on my phone. Could you try another connection?
- pragmatick 3y agoSame here. From germany, if that makes any difference.
- bobbydigitales 3y agoThanks for reporting, we'll look into it!
- jvdvegt 3y agoSame here, from the Netherlands. Small print on the error page says: Generated by cloudfront (CloudFront) Request ID: nu9PuEmZJeaWA8op7PaSfAal0M3IfCzp9mnd04PlxRiSWErx1M4qOw
- bobbydigitales 3y agoThanks for reporting, we're working on it!
- paulmd 3y agosame here. wayback machine to the rescue. http://web.archive.org/web/20230530134020/http://docs.dotbigbang.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20230530134020/http://docs.dotbig...
- meheleventyone 3y agoIt didn’t matter for me but maybe try https rather than http. On iOS Safari it redirected me to the https url and loaded.
- laustta 3y agoThis looks very impressive, great work and best of luck with the platform
- bobbydigitales 3y agoThanks so much!
- chrisweekly 3y agoHaha, this looks AWESOME. I just played a bit of "Escape Unspeakable" (one of the featured games) and if it's any indication, dotbigbang is going to do very well. Great job! Good luck!
- bobbydigitales 3y agoThanks so much! Yes Escape Unspeakeable is a very silly fun game :)
- meheleventyone 3y agoI made this game so thanks!
- bryan_w 3y agoIf Meta was still allowed to buy things, you'd be billionaires. This is pretty much as good as their horizon platform but can actually run on my phone. Good job
- bobbydigitales 3y agoThanks! My DMs and bank account are open :)
- cpersona 3y agoAbsolutely blown away. Not sure what I’m looking at but it’s amazing.
- bobbydigitales 3y agoThanks so much! Don't need to know what you're looking at if you like it! :)
- a257 3y agoThis is so cool! Though, how do you ensure that people are playing fair? When I dabbled in web-based games a year ago, I noticed that it's pretty difficult to have a good anti-cheat system for games that runs on browsers.
- bobbydigitales 3y agoFor a lot of types of games (e.g. social, creative, silly fun) it doesn't matter. For those where it does you have to run servers that you control and write server-authoritative code. You have to assume clients are hacked whenever you're writing competitive games anyway, so there's not much difference there.
- a257 3y agoFair enough, I guess it doesn't really matter if someone hacks a drawing/building game. But people love competitive games. I guess you can prevent most overt hacks through server-side validation. But still, that doesn't stop more sophisticated users from creating and using subtler hacks (such as aimbots).
- bobbydigitales 3y agoYep! Cheating and combating cheating is a never-ending arms race! You can use heuristics on the server to try and detect suspect behavior, but the issue is that the very best players can be very difficult to distinguish from cheaters. Even with client-side anti-cheat, you have to have the cheat before you can add the signature to have the client-side search for it and ban the player, so there are no simple solutions unfortunately. (Most of this coming from my previous life working on PC games :) )
- Geee 3y agoIt doesn't lock mouse cursor on Safari, making it impossible to play.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bobbydigitales 3y agoThanks for the report. We'll take a look, Safari pointer lock is sometimes a bit fickle and we have a regression there!
- Physkal 3y agoHad a really intense battle on my first try, the response time is great and very playable. Great lobby music too. thanks
- bobbydigitales 3y agoAwesome, glad you enjoyed it! Those lobbies can get pretty sweaty!
- meheleventyone 3y agoHey, I work with bobbydigitales on this (along with a bunch of others) and had a hand in making a lot of the games including Diamond Wars linked here so if anyone has question about gamedev on dot big bang please ask away! If you’re interested as a developer and want to know how we plan to support you we have this landing page: https://developers.dotbigbang.com/ https://developers.dotbigbang.com/
- Tade0 3y agoThis works on my six year old phone - impressive, considering that more often than not in such cases I don't even get past the loading screen. I like the architecture - most game engines working in the browser don't use anything resembling ECS, which makes it impossible for me to produce anything but very simple demos.
- bobbydigitales 3y agoThanks, glad it worked for you! We want to make sure it actually works on a broad range of devices! Our lead artist regularly tests on his Pixel 2 :)
- chainingsolid 3y agoI tried on my pinephone, made it all the way to actually rendering a frame of 3D gameplay then either didn't have working controls or froze. And I expected it to crash the browser (firefox). So well done!
- bobbydigitales 3y agoThanks! In our testing, Firefox is about 40% slower than Chromium-based browsers or Safari. Would be interesting to know what the performance was like with Chromium on that device! https://download-chromium.appspot.com/ https://download-chromium.appspot.com/
- davedx 3y agoSuper impressive. Good work!
- meheleventyone 3y agoThanks!
- davedx 3y agoTheir company website: https://controlzee.com/#job-list https://controlzee.com/#job-list
- parasti 3y agoThis is very cool, but doesn't actually load in two seconds. I would have been really impressed if that part was legitimately true.
- meheleventyone 3y agoThanks! Load times obviously vary depending on your connection, hardware and so on. I expect two seconds is true for bobbydigitales. We’ll continue to optimise loading though so it’s great for everyone.
- maccard 3y agoI'm on a z flip 3 android device with 500mbps WiFi, and seeing closer to 20 seconds than 2 seconds on all the links shared here.
- meheleventyone 3y agoThanks for letting us know.
- bobbydigitales 3y agoThanks for testing! Could you try this game: https://dotbigbang.com/game/cab2b545338144d68fb8934801a1cd97/adventure https://dotbigbang.com/game/cab2b545338144d68fb8934801a1cd97... And could you let me know which browser you're using?
- maccard 3y agoUsing Firefox for android. That link is about 6 seconds for me. Its still quick, but a good chunk off 2 seconds
- bobbydigitales 3y agoThanks for testing and going the info! Firefox is about 40% slower than Chromium-based browsers and Safari for us, we focus on the default browser on each platform so Firefox isn't tested often. Firefox also accounts for about 0.4% of our traffic and their performance analysis tools aren't very deep, so unfortunately it's hard to justify allocating time to improve there. We also can't load in 2 seconds on any device we can run on. There are obviously some devices that ship Chrome on Android that can load the game, but are incredibly slow. So yes, not always 2 seconds! Finally, we still have a huge amount of known performance we can gain in our loading, so I do hope I can come back in the future and show that 2 second loading on a lot more devices!
- kosolam 3y agoRegarding the platform, I read the landing page for developers. I see a lot of good intentions. But how do you back it up? What guarantees do you provide for developers not to get vendor locked with you, at your mercy?
- meheleventyone 3y agoWe are first and foremost a platform and as such the success of developers on it is our success. It doesn’t make sense for us to act in a way that’s against the interests of our third-party developers. I personally think the Unity fiasco and developer dissatisfaction towards Roblox strongly shows the problems a company out of touch with that can manifest. That said we can only back up our good intentions with actions. Right now the strongest thing I can point to is our terms of service which explicitly make sure you retain ownership of anything you build on dot big bang. We’re at an early stage with monetization and will have more concrete guarantees published in the near future. The aim there is to be fair and explicit. Particularly in comparison to other platforms. In terms of vendor lock in we do intend to make it easy to bring your assets off the platform. This is currently quite easy with scripts but we will be allowing people to export models as well in the near term. We’ve also talked about providing the means to export games wholesale so you could build a game on dot big bang and sell it on Steam etc. How that would all work is very much a work in progress. More good intentions I know but we are a small team with a broad scope building as fast as we can! We’re all long tenured game developers and recognise these concerns as they have often been our own! If you have specific projects, ideas and what not you’d like to chat about we’d love to hear from you directly.
- bobbydigitales 3y agoJust adding on to this, I have a work-in-progress GLTF exporter that enables you to export your game level from dot big bang into Godot(https://bobbydigitales.github.io/twitter/data/tweets_media/1534920756357869569-FUzWw9VVUAEsOMv.jpg https://bobbydigitales.github.io/twitter/data/tweets_media/1...), Unreal Engine 5 (https://bobbydigitales.github.io/twitter/data/tweets_media/1535015203502379008-FU14L5PVEAE_eeH.jpg https://bobbydigitales.github.io/twitter/data/tweets_media/1...) Unity (https://bobbydigitales.github.io/twitter/data/tweets_media/1534913461364224000-FU0bppmVsAwzdgr.jpg https://bobbydigitales.github.io/twitter/data/tweets_media/1...) and Blender (https://bobbydigitales.github.io/twitter/data/tweets_media/1535096422600650752-FU3CDMQUUAA1ipZ.jpg https://bobbydigitales.github.io/twitter/data/tweets_media/1...) It's nice because all the game entities end up being separate entities in the destination tools, so you can rearrange and move things around vs it just being a monolithic blob. I would like to consider open sourcing the engine at some point in the future, at least for single-player games, but my view is that with a small team, we have to make the engine excellent and the platform successful before we do that.
- december456 3y agoHey, is the loading screen implemented by the game itself or does dotbigbang measure and provide that? In the latter case, could you make it so it shows progress? Im no web designer but i think its crucial in rather resource-heavy settings and/or the potential of old devices.
- meheleventyone 3y agoThanks for the feedback, the loading screen should show progress in a bar in the middle of the screen so I’m interested to know what you’re seeing specifically.
- december456 3y agoThere isnt any progress for me on mobile, its just boxes cycling and a loading... text underneath. Perhaps it has something to do with content blocking?? Im not sure.
- meheleventyone 3y agoThanks, sorry it’s not working properly for you. If you have the time it’d be great to know what device and browser you are using and is there anything non-default about the setup? On desktop it can be hard to account for all the extensions people load into their browsers which tend to cause issues occasionally but usually that’s not so much of a problem on mobile. You could also try loading in incognito.
- 20after4 3y agoDiamond Dropper is actually a lot of fun. Great work.
- meheleventyone 3y agoThanks! It was a lot of fun to make and it’s really nice to hear from people enjoying it.
- JCharante 3y agoAre you the dev of diamond dropper? There's people pulling the old civ 5 unready troll by leaving/entering the circle since it begins a new countdown whenever a player enters/leaves the room queue square
- meheleventyone 3y agoYou mean Diamond Wars? That exploit should be fixed and it should prevent the timer restarting when a person the circle has already seen renters it. We’ll investigate and fix it again though! Thanks a lot for letting us know.
- resonious 3y agoThe quickstart and such have links to https://www.dotbigbang.com https://www.dotbigbang.com which is showing me a SSL_ERROR_NO_CYPHER_OVERLAP on Firefox 117.
- meheleventyone 3y agoThank you for letting us know we’ll get that fixed!
- bobbydigitales 3y agoThanks for reporting, we have a fix for this that will be rolling out soon!
- mattsop 3y agoDiamonds was a good game - last two, opponent heavily outgunning me, he builds a bridge in my direction, runs across it, is sent flying into the blue abyss on a springboard I'd dropped at the same time. Sadly tho, it's not getting anywhere near a steady frame rate in Firefox on my 4790k @ 3440x1440.
- meheleventyone 3y agoThe springboard trap is a classic, another fun one is the baseball bat to send people flying. It’s really underrated if you’re behind the upgrade curve. Performance wise we find Firefox approximately halves the performance sadly, mostly in the speed of execution of the JS code. Both Safari and Chromium based browsers perform significantly better. Games really expose the differences in the various engine implementations because they rely on executing a lot of code all the time. That said we have an enormous amount of head room to optimise the engine so will make progress so it’s less of an issue.
- bobbydigitales 3y agoLol sounds like an epic last play :) In terms of performance, Firefox is about 40% slower than Chromium-based browser or Safari, basically purely in the performance of Spidermonkey. We have tried to optimize on Firefox in the past, however the development tools there make it difficult to determine what the problem might be beyon "everything is slower". For V8 we have the Chromium tracing tools that les us understand where V8 is spending time on potentially unoptimized code, or on megamorphic property access. Finally, unfortunately Firefox is currently used by 1% of our players, so it's hard to find time to improve it. I would love to know how vanilla Chromium performed on the same machine! https://download-chromium.appspot.com/ https://download-chromium.appspot.com/
- dinkleberg 3y agoThis is very impressive, especially this working well on mobile! One suggestion, if it isn't already possible (maybe it is if you have an account), would be configurable keybinds. I'm using a wonky split ergonomic keyboard and the space bar is on the right side, so I can't do WASD + space + mouse at the same time.
- meheleventyone 3y agoThanks, I develop on a Kinesis keyboard so know your pain, some games support using ‘v’ to jump but will check if that’s the case and get it fixed if not. Abstracting our input api to allow the setup of keybindings at the platform level is on our list of things to do!
- bobbydigitales 3y agoThanks!, This really is something we just haven't got to. I'm adding a task right now for it!
- antifa 3y ago> breakdown of major features This link only shows: > Now that we released @_dotbigbang_ v0.8, I thought I’d spend a bit of time to go over what we’ve launched so far and what we have left to do before we get close to a 1.0 release! () And a single gif. I wouldn't call this a breakdown. It's not really a last or anything.
- meheleventyone 3y agoIt’s a Twitter thread so the rest of the breakdown is threaded as replies.
- antifa 3y agoThey didn't show up for me.
- meheleventyone 3y agoYeah Twitter has been wonky for a while now.
- bobbydigitales 3y agoHey! Thanks for checking it out. Twitter broke threads for people who aren't signed in sometime this year so unless your signed in, they will only show you the first tweet in a thread. Previously you could use Twitter as a place to post general information like this, but since they broke it I should really move the information somewhere else!
- bobbydigitales 3y agoThanks again for the feedback. We moved this information to our blog now: https://blog.dotbigbang.com/2023/10/10/dot-big-bang-v0-8/ https://blog.dotbigbang.com/2023/10/10/dot-big-bang-v0-8/