7 ms·
MMO Asteroids
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- joshontheweb 15y agoI love it but I think it would be more fun with teams.
- drunkpotato 15y agoHah! Great fun. I've found the strategy for long-term survival is simply to stay in the spawning point, spin, and fire as many rounds as possible. I suspect this is because the damage you take for hitting another ship's shields is set high enough that the probability of taking bullet damage is roughly constant whether moving or staying in place, while the probability of taking damage while moving is much higher than that of taking damage while staying in place. Anyone with a more careful attitude towards quantitative analysis than I care to verify?
- raquo 15y agoIf these were humans, a standing-still ship would attract more aggression as an easy target, but bots don't seem to care about that, so it should be good option for maximizing kills/deaths. However, it takes a long time to kill anyone without active movement – hunting down near-dead ships is the best way to get best kills/minute. (and by hunting down i mean crashing into them of course, as well as point-blank fire).
- ORioN63 15y agoThere's no way, that's all just other players. TWO times a screenful of players, started to gank me. Maybe I'm just a sore loser ahaha. Great game, anyway.
- lnanek 15y agoYeah, I saw an entire screen of players turn toward me once before as well and turn away immediately later. Hopefully players end up in the same world with just a lot of computer opponents as well...
- mikeknoop 15y agoApply the CounterStrike model of short 3 minute rounds and you'd have yourself an actual game here.
- gillianseed 15y agoLol yes this is lots of fun, however I seem to continously pickup some stalker hellbent on destroying me in particular and chasing me all across the universe. Well, atleast it makes me feel special :)
- judegomila 15y agoThis is great. An MMO pong would be fun...
- cpeterso 15y agoSIGGRAPH 1991 and 2006 featured demos of the ~3000 member audience playing Pong. Each half of the room controlled their paddle by holding up colored wands to vote up or down. I think the 2006 show also had the audience pilot a flight simulator. It was amazing at how quickly the audience got really good at the games! Here are some photos. I saw a video somewhere, but I can't find it now. http://stage.itp.nyu.edu/history/timeline/cinematrix.html http://stage.itp.nyu.edu/history/timeline/cinematrix.html http://www.4colorrebellion.com/archives/2006/08/03/siggraph-2006-massively-multiplayer-coop-pong/ http://www.4colorrebellion.com/archives/2006/08/03/siggraph-...
- joshes 15y agoCould this be an April Fools gag? I wish I had screencapped it, but at one point I found myself in the middle of the screen, watching four swarm-like quadrants of fellow ships (top-left, top-right, bottom-left and bottom-right) all moving in relative unison. Anytime a swarm started to get close to me, I would inch away for a few seconds before the swarm turned back. I was able to stay in this middle, peaceful area for an extremely long time before random stray fire eventually finished me off.
- jbverschoor 15y agosame here
- wildbunny 15y agoFiddler shows a connection to node.seb.ly on keep alive - not sure if any data is getting sent/received though....
- Kiro 15y agoAll the ships on the screen just stopped flying around and started shooting at me in sync. Ok, it happend again now... Something strange is definitely going on.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- hobin 15y agoYes. Another way to see this is that few (perhaps even none at all) other ships are constantly firing at maximum rate. If this were multiplayer, that'd be what most people would be doing.
- Kiro 15y agoYeah, the ships are not moving "natural" at all. If this is just a joke I must say I'm disappointed.
- judegomila 15y agoAdd a tweet / FB share button :>
- lnanek 15y agoHmm, favorite strategy: zoom ahead full speed with a spammed bullet stream in front of you. After wrapping around enough times your bullet stream (and probably you) are going to nail someone. As you get better you can adjust your course a little to hit more, or hunt down people after that who are critically damaged by the bullet stream. :) Fun, all in all, and an awesome tech demo. For finished games, there's already http://www.getcontinuum.com/ http://www.getcontinuum.com/ which is basically the game with rules and rounds and teams and whatnot. Although that is thick client.
- stcredzero 15y agoThanks for posting this. I am at work on an Asteroids-movement style MMO mashup with Elite. There will be "weapons lock" but there will be aiming and positioning as well, so dodging will be key. Players will be able to design their own ships, which will have performance determined by their shape, and placement of components within. (So, the more wedge-shaped your ship is, the more armor value it has for shots from the front, but the slower it can turn because its structure is less robust. Also, the longer your laser-tube is, the better range it has, etc.) This will happen in a procedurally generated universe containing in excess of 2^128 worlds. I'm doing this as a study in emergence in games. I want to implement an MMO where mindless "keyboard macro" grinding is totally absent. Wherever possible, we will replace a boring grinding mechanic with something akin to optimizing or micromanaging in an RTS or 4X. What's more, the optimizing/managing mechanics will actually be emergent themselves, building on the ability to write scripts for almost everything in game. (These will run on the server, so the user can license their scripts to other players for in-game money.)
- MrJagil 15y agoFactions!
- stcredzero 15y agoAny owner of a Warp Gate installation will constitute a faction. Players will earn micropayments for use of their jump gate. The "Winning" faction will be the one controlling the most jump gates. Jump gates will require considerable exotic resources to maintain. Falling behind in jump gate maintenance will cause ownership to revert to the Precursor maintenance bots.
- drstrangevibes 15y agoxpilot.....nuff said
- jbellis 15y agoToo bad it's fake. I wouldn't mind an xpilot revival at all. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XPilot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XPilot
- randall 15y agoOr subspace! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubSpace_(video_game) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubSpace_(video_game)
- tansey 15y agoSubspace is exactly what I had in mind when I saw the OP. It even has a bot API, though unfortunately no one has made a fully-playable one yet.
- p0nce 15y agoMay I plug my own game here? It's not multiplayer but still favor intense dog-fighting with AI. http://gamesfrommars.fr/vibrant http://gamesfrommars.fr/vibrant A multiplayer mode is the most requested feature, but I don't know if it's worth it.
- andrew_null 15y agothis is one of my all-time favorite games.
- nikatwork 15y agoThat game is evil. It ate at least two startup's worth of productivity from me.
- smashing 15y agoIt still exists as Continuum -> http://www.getcontinuum.com/ http://www.getcontinuum.com/ From the website: Ever imagine what it'd be like to play Asteroids against your friends?
- h2s 15y agoAnyone else only realise this was fake when they eventually opened the Network tab in developer tools to find out how it worked? After that, I double-realised when I noticed that none of the other ships ever idled while everyone else attempted to figure it out simultaneously.
- ck2 15y agoSome good April 1st jokes become real eventually though.
- excerionsforte 15y agoFun, but crowded.
- mkramlich 15y agoI once saw pretty much all 20 enemy ships nearest me suddenly turn towards me in near unison. Those were bots, not real people. I like the idea of the game. I feel a little disappointed that he appears to have lied about it actually being MMO. I'll grant him one "get out of jail free card": perhaps it can be MMO, but if not enough human players are playing at any time he fills the world with bots. That's about the nicest guess I can make.
- reason 15y agoAdd me, guys. My username is 'reason'. I'm up over in the top left corner.
- tkahn6 15y agoAs others have said, this is fake but I give it one day until someone does a 'Show HN' with a real version.
- cr4zy 15y agoCheck chrome://net-internals/#events and include actual bytes under "capture". The data being sent through seb.ly is not enough to for the game: .#{"type":"leave","id":1333318871470} It does look like he's updating the players coming in and out though.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- jabo 15y agoA friend and I have been working on an MMO game called Pixza: http://pixza.com/lite http://pixza.com/lite Unlike MMO Asteroids, we don't fake the multi-player element. (Try pulling the network cable :) ) But with that comes the problem of bootstrapping the game to get a critical mass, since the game is boring with a few players. Building an AI engine for the game seems very complicated because it's a strategy game.
- emehrkay 15y agoThis is insane! I was surrounded by at least 8 players all shooting at me. Really funny though.
- senjutsuka 15y agoDamn it! I commented on it earlier noticing some irregularities in the way the players moved... I just realized this was an april fools joke!
- jaimefjorge 15y agoFun fact: if you're in chrome, enter ctrl+shift+j. When javascript console enters you can play with it. Try entering player.energy = 100000 :)
- jabo 15y agoThis was one the of things that I worked on to avoid, when building Pixza (pixza.com) a HTML4/5+JS+Erlang MMO game. I wrote a script to obfuscate all the JS object and member names to random strings before deploying the code.
- jaimefjorge 15y agoVery interesting. I guess this is always a risk when writing javascript. good mitigation though.
- FrancescoRizzi 15y agoThis is madness, but I love you for it :)
- decad 15y agoVery similar to http://rawkets.com/ http://rawkets.com/ by Rob Hawkes from the UK.
- JakeSc 15y agoAs others have pointed out, this game is a bit of a prank. For example, the "CONNECTIONS" value is randomly generated: numPlayers+=randomInteger(1,5) Though there is indeed some WebSocket communication between your browser and the server. Here's what most of these communiqés look like: {"type": "leave", "id": 133334510518} I wonder why the author even uses WebSockets at all, or what these "leave" packets are meant for.
- zaptheimpaler 15y agoAghh can't believe this is fake... Does anyone know whether this is actually feasible to make using Node.JS (or any other technology?)
- bricestacey 15y agoThis reminds me of Netrek. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netrek http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netrek
- ecito 15y agoHere's his blog page for this: http://seb.ly/2012/04/node-js-experiment-mmo-asteroids/ http://seb.ly/2012/04/node-js-experiment-mmo-asteroids/ Looks like his next iteration will be real multiplayer. That will be awesome
- fictorial 15y agoI really loathe April 1.
- hcarvalhoalves 15y agoNode.js is the real APFJ.
- schubert 15y agofunction boom() { for (var a = 0; a < 100; a++) { for (var d = 0; d < ships.length; d++) { var e = ships[d]; if (e != player) { if (e != undefined) { e.hit(); } } } } setTimeout("boom()", 2000); } function restoreHealth() { console.log("restoring health"); player.energy = 200; setTimeout("restoreHealth()", 100); } setTimeout("restoreHealth()", 100); setTimeout("boom()", 2000);
- jmilloy 15y agoMy GF couldn't get over that I was spending my Sunday evening blasting away at 1900 other "nerdy hackernews-ers", until I realized from the coordinated attacks it couldn't be real. Still a ton of fun.
- cpeterso 15y agoThis reminds me of the (real) game Realm of the Mad God, a "run 'n' gun" MMORPG with 8-bit style graphics built in Flash: http://www.edery.org/2011/06/realm-of-the-mad-god/ http://www.edery.org/2011/06/realm-of-the-mad-god/ Now that I think about it, the game is basically a Gauntlet MMORPG! :)
- deliciouscoffee 15y agoIf an mmo version of asteroids sounds interesting then you should try out Continuum (http://www.getcontinuum.com/ http://www.getcontinuum.com/) It was released commercially in 1997 and subsequently abandoned by its developer. The community took over the client/server and it has evolved into a pretty complex game.
- quangv 15y agooh this isn't real?
- rekul 15y agoI'm thinking of building a simple game like this(but not with shooting stuff) using node on the server side since it's the cool thing to do now. But idk how many players a server could sustain or if the browser client might slow down when rendering many players on the screen. Anybody want to help? Should just take about a week to build something playable i think.
- jasonkester 15y agoI actually did this with Joust, something like ten years ago, using java sockets for the communications and dhtml for presentation. The multiplayer version is long gone, but you can still get try out the original dhtml head-to-head version (provided you have IE3+ or Netscape Navigator handy): http://www.jasonkester.com/joust/ http://www.jasonkester.com/joust/ Might have to spend a weekend cramming it full of Node.js and replacing the 1998 DOM referencing syntax with something a bit more modern... Edit: Holy yikes, it actually works in the latest Chrome and Firefox. No idea how... http://www.jasonkester.com/joust/ http://www.jasonkester.com/joust/
- jamesmoss 15y agoIf you hadn't guessed already, the author confirmed this was a fake this morning: http://seb.ly/2012/04/gotcha-fake-mmo-asteroids-april-fool/ http://seb.ly/2012/04/gotcha-fake-mmo-asteroids-april-fool/
- seb_ly 15y agoI'm so sorry everyone, I didn't think for a minute that anyone would be even remotely convinced. It was of course an April fool - here's my full confession : http://seb.ly/2012/04/gotcha-fake-mmo-asteroids-april-fool/ http://seb.ly/2012/04/gotcha-fake-mmo-asteroids-april-fool/ I hope you see the funny side :)
- GabeN 15y agoFor a real old school MMO you should all try Jet Set Willy Online, it involves a small client download rather than being browser based but it faithfully captures the original feel of the game. http://jsw.ovine.net/ http://jsw.ovine.net/
- neave 15y agoApril Fools! http://seb.ly/2012/04/gotcha-fake-mmo-asteroids-april-fool/ http://seb.ly/2012/04/gotcha-fake-mmo-asteroids-april-fool/
- specialist 15y agoSorry for the noob question: How does one prevent cheating/hacking with a client-side runtime? Is there a crucial dividing line of functionality between server- and client-side functions? Say perhaps fog of war and client's only get the position updates of visible enemies? If there are best practices / conventional wisdom, pointers (links) would be appreciated. Thanks!