

Show HN: Skycraft, a creative voxel adventure game in WebGL - haeric
http://skycraft.io

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PaulFreund
Your game is extremely promising, how do you want to implement multiplayer
gaming technically? Does it have to run over your servers or is it in a peer
to peer fashion or will users be able to have their own servers?

And very important, how do you think about open source, self hosting and
customization?

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haeric
Glad you see the potential! :)

I have only done a few tests yet with multiplayer, but as long as WebRTC
doesn't stumble on any security hiccups (like Websockets did in its infancy),
it will most likely be p2p multiplayer with a framework called peer.js
(<http://peerjs.com/>), which uses WebRTC.

So for the actual multiplayer-part, there isn't really any reason to have
servers, other than to negotiate the WebRTC connection. But blocks have to be
saved somewhere, and thus, at least one (possibly all) of the players have to
be connected to a server to send block changes. And of course you need a
server to actually load the html, javascript and original blocks from.

So you need some kind of server for each world, as a place to save blocks.
Initially, these servers will be on skycraft.io, where you can play with a
certain number of friends for free. But in the future it would be really,
really cool to allow players to mod the game, and let them host their servers
on their own domains as well, to allow for modding. I haven't really thought
through how to do this the best way though, there are many, many details that
have to done correctly for it to work.

Customization/modding is still a bit into the future though, I have to make
more of the actual game first! :) All I can really say is that it's definitely
in the back of my head, even though I can't promise anything at this point.

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PaulFreund
That sounds really good! What would be most important to me is that the data
of the worlds would be saved on my own server (and I think many others would
appreciate this too, espacially as they are used to it from minecraft).

I'll support you and hope that this will be possible. The more backers you
have the more you can focus on the game. Make it good! :)

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Skoofoo
I like the aesthetic of this and the fact that it's based on the open web,
though I wish that you invested your time into making more original video
games. There aren't enough of those in the world!

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haeric
Thanks for the encouragement! :)

But about that originality.. Aren't most games really inspired by previous
games, iterating on them, remixing in stuff from other games and making them
better? Didn't Transport Tycoon get a lot of inspiration from Railroad Tycoon,
but still end up a truly great game?

Just like Minecraft built on Infiniminer and gave a new experience, just like
Terraria built on Minecraft and gave a new experience, I hope Skycraft will be
able to give yet another experience. But until it gets more distinctive
features than the technology itself I guess it feels quite unoriginal, yeah, I
totally get what you're saying :)

tl;dr: Just wait, it'll get better!

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MWil
Made my 2 year old laptop scream and then never could load past a black screen

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haeric
Hum.. Does WebGL stuff otherwise work for you? For instance, does this work?
[http://threejs.org/examples/webgl_buffergeometry_particles.h...](http://threejs.org/examples/webgl_buffergeometry_particles.html)
And what OS and browser are you using?

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MWil
Yes, that link works at 11fps and I'm using Firefox 21

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haeric
Do you see the cube loading in the beginning? Have you tried restarting your
browser? I have seen some random crashes a very few times, where I've had to
do that, some times because there has been too many tabs open. There's still a
ways to go before WebGL gaming is 100% stable.. but that's also some of the
point of doing this project :)

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MWil
I finally did get it running. Thanks!

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stephanos2k
Looks great! So fluid; and my Mac didn't even start a fan running it. cool :)

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haeric
It doesn't? My 13" Macbook certainly fires up the song of its people, but I
guess an iMac or 15" / 17" should do a lot better :)

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LaSombra
My 15" MBP is screaming, but the game is very very fluid, I'm impressed.

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iernie
It runs incredibly smooth on my 13" MBA as well.

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MatthewPhillips
Looks quite nice. Does this use voxel.js?

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haeric
Thank you! :) If I had started developing Skycraft in 2013, it might have been
voxel.js, but it didn't exist at all a year ago. I could have converted to
voxel.js, but chose not to, as I have some things voxel.js doesn't yet
(lighting, ambient occlusion), and the whole floaty islands thing allows for
some special optimizations that would be hard to generalize into voxel.js. So
it's just "normal" Three.js., but I really like the voxel.js project!

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twodayslate
Accept bitcoins?

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haeric
Hum, I'll think about it if I hear it from a few more people! :)

