

Show HN: Open Sourcing my HTML5 Multiplayer Game Engine - renownedmedia
https://github.com/tlhunter/Cobalt-Calibur-3

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bicknergseng
"Emergent Gameplay People eventually start building walls around NPCs. They
also build synthetic tiles in patterns to efficiently remove corrupted areas.
They also draw penises and destroy each others houses."

lol.

~~~
bcardarella
"drawing penises" seems to be the first thing people do for these multi-user
apps.

I created a whiteboard built with websockets over a year ago on Hacker News,
over 100 people could connect and draw anything they wanted. The screen would
clear after 5 minutes. So many penises. I told my girlfriend they were rocket
ships, I don't think she bought it.

~~~
jessevondoom
Your girlfriend didn't recognize penises?

~~~
n09n
Maybe they are lesbians.

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Zarel
Players appear to be unable to say anything but their own name:

<http://d.pr/i/P85E>

And fixed: <https://github.com/tlhunter/Cobalt-Calibur-3/pull/26>

~~~
usea
Sorry I was stealing your castle. I guess you didn't see me apologize
considering chat text doesn't work.

~~~
Zarel
No worries. People overran my castle eventually, so I decided to dive into the
codebase.

Which led me to do, among other fun things like give myself immunity to mobs
and corruption, pinpoint and fix chat text:

<https://github.com/tlhunter/Cobalt-Calibur-3/pull/26>

~~~
loopdoend
app.environment.corruption = [];

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vitno
A lack of support for changing keybindings is annoying... (I use dvorak)

other than that, cool!

~~~
kzahel
Seconded. But I gave up complaining about this a long time ago.

~~~
RegEx
Yes. Bind a toggle between dvorak and qwerty, and get to playing. Your trash
talking may suffer for a while, but you'll manage.

~~~
Inufu
This. I have a keyboard with a hardware switch for Dvorak/Qwerty, and whenever
I'm playing on this keyboard I can't for the life of me type a coherent
sentence. Under other circumstances, I can type both on dvorak and qwerty just
fine, but not while gaming.

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james33
The title is somewhat misleading. It is an HTML5 game that was open-sourced,
not specifically a game engine.

~~~
alexanderh
I'm not sure I totally follow. Just because HTML5 was used as the "rendering
surface" instead of say, a DirectX Window handle, its not a "game engine"?

It may not be a legitimate "rendering engine" but I'd say it sure as hell is a
"type of game engine". What exactly makes it not a game engine? Is it because
its lacking tools and/or level editors or something? From what I see, it is a
proof of concept RPG built on top of an HTML5 RPG game engine.

Having said that though, this seems to have been released rather prematurely.
Its extremely rough around the edges and clearly hasn't been tested in every
platform and browser.

~~~
angrycoder
A game is built on top of a game engine which is in turn built upon an API. So
gears of war is a game built on the unreal game engine which is built upon the
API of directx or openGL( plus whatever for sound, OS windowing, and input).

In the HTML5 world, impact, construct2, craftyjs, and limejs are all game
engines. You use them to make games, rather than writing your own routines to
deal with canvas rendering, audio, and input.

~~~
alexanderh
I guess coming from the web world I would call those Game Frameworks, not
necessarily engines. Just because he hasnt laid out a proper API doesnt make
his game "run" (as in engine) any less... its still a working game. And it
could be used as the engine to power similar type games, even though time and
forethought hasn't been put into making that easy (like in the case of a
Framework API). So in my mind its still a game "engine". But I see your point,
definitely.

I never really knew "engines" implied API's and abstraction, but I guess that
does make sense.

Just the fact that its running in a browser on Webkit kind of implies its an
engine of sorts in my mind.

Thats just how my train of thought works when thinking about things in the
context of javascript/the web world.

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tboren
This is pretty neat! For some reason the player sprite doesn't show, but
otherwise this is great.

EDIT: seems to throw an error when trying to connect on Chrome Mac OSX Lion.

"Error during WebSocket handshake: 'Connection' header value is not 'Upgrade'"

Works on Safari though.

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wham
Very cool! Right now you can still hack yourself into godmode via the console
(app.player.god = true, which gives you spawn editing powers, I couldn't help
myself from building a little maze in the spawn), but for a work in progress
it's very impressive!

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rip_kirby
Thank you for sharing this. I'm new to HTML/CSS/Javascript entirely and I'm
getting into it to make games.

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xd
example server: <http://zyu.me/>

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sharingancoder
Pretty neat! Looks amateurish but a good platform to start off on

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bazookaBen
one thing i learned abt making games is to limit the game space, and user
input. Foster a healthy community first, then introduce freedom.

