
Humble Mozilla Bundle - Osmose
https://www.humblebundle.com/
======
laurent123456
With all these impressive advancement in browser technology, it looks like
supporting non-qwerty keyboards in games is still a struggle. Or maybe
developers aren't aware of the problem since no matter how big the game is,
something as basic as keyboard controls is sometime completely wrong (at least
on azerty keyboards). I don't know much about videogame development, but is it
really difficult to somehow detect the user keyboard?

~~~
jellofiend
Time is a finite resource and even more precious for small/indie developers.
Maybe they could write something to detect keyboard layouts (though I am not
sure they could) or they could do what the other poster suggested and have
configurable key layouts.

The problem is every second working on something that really matters, to what,
<1% of the population is something that you aren't working on that is more
important. Not to mention the extra overhead of testing and maintaining that
system. It might be a valid gripe with a AAA game dev but complaining about
your fairly rare corner case is just picking nits.

~~~
ANTSANTS
That 1% figure is hilariously wrong, but I agree with your point. Indie game
dev is hard. If you "waste" too much time early on doing "the right thing" for
tasks that can wait like localization, your game might not make it off the
ground. So most accomplished English-speaking indie devs assume English and
QWERTY layout to start because it's one less thing to think about while you're
trying to get a barebones game running.

The less defensible outcome is when the QWERTY assumption remains 'til the
end, and the devs just want to ship the damn thing already, so the proper
alternate keyboard layout/non-360 controller/etc. support gets cut and the
burden is pushed onto the users. This sucks, but is somewhat defensible
because if you are a gamer in France or whatever, you are probably used to
needing to switch your keyboard layout or rebind your keys in the same way
that English players of Japanese PC games are used to needing to use a
Japanese locale, or that people with non-360 controllers are used to needing
to use an XInput wrapper: we hate it, but we've already dealt with the problem
once, so doing it again isn't a big deal.

~~~
clarry
> we hate it, but we've already dealt with the problem once, so doing it again
> isn't a big deal

Some of us hate it and just don't play these player-hostile games. I think
that games that are meant to be played will respect the player and treat her
dearly. Games that exist just for the buck though... oh well.

~~~
ANTSANTS
Would you really not play if they give you the option to rebind keys? I've
jumped through many worse hoops trying to play Japanese games that I was under
no delusions of being the target audience for.

~~~
clarry
If they _don 't_ give me the option to rebind keys...

I used to jump through hoops myself. For example, I rebound keys in some older
Touhous by disassembling and modifying the binary.

These days I just can't be bothered. There are more games than I could play in
a lifetime, so I have plenty to choose from. And if/when game developers treat
me like shit (whether it be with DRM or something else), I'm principled
against playing their game. _" Go away, you're not our target audience, we
don't care about you."_

I try to focus the little time I have on games whose authors really want
everyone to play and enjoy. The more effort they put into that, the more
attention they deserve. If they respect my freedom, that's better still. And
that is my idea of _humble_. I hate how the word is used to market a bundle of
games on sale...

Truly caring about the player is one field where the indie scene could really
shine, compared to the big corps who mass-produce big titles for the biggest
market. Unfortunately even the indies seem to have other priorities.

------
Osmose
If you're using Firefox and can't see the promotional game for this on
about:home yet, go to about:home and open up the Web Console. Run
"gSnippetsMap.clear()" and then clear your cache. When you refresh about:home,
you should download the promo. Otherwise it should hit all Firefox users'
about:home page within the next 24 hours.

~~~
taliesan
Hard link to the Humble Bundle snippet is here:
[https://snippets.mozilla.com/show/4606/](https://snippets.mozilla.com/show/4606/)

~~~
taliesan
(Only works in FF.)

~~~
duiker101
uhm seems to be working on chorme for me

~~~
taliesan
Ah! Was told it might lead to a 404 in Chrome. Good to know it doesn't.

~~~
Osmose
It won't 404, but that page was made by copy-pasting the source code of
about:home from Firefox, including some image paths that are only valid on
Firefox. I was too lazy to make it better since it's not _really_ meant for
public consumption (it will 404 once this snippet is disabled in a week, for
example).

------
ANTSANTS
I've sunk countless hours into FTL, this bundle is worth getting for that
alone.

~~~
vitamen
Agreed, FTL is a rich and fun game where death is permanent and even a
successful game could take little more than an hour, but the game still easily
provides weeks worth of enjoyment.

------
Touche
This is awesome! I love web games but the crap to quality ratio is really bad.
It's hard to find good games. I hope Humble Bundle continues to create curated
list of web games, not just 3D ones.

~~~
Touche
If you have recommendations for quality web-based games (I'm particularly
interested in side-scrollers or RTS games) please let me know.

~~~
jim-greer
My favorite side-scroller: Robot Wants Ice Cream

[http://www.kongregate.com/games/Hamumu/robot-wants-ice-
cream](http://www.kongregate.com/games/Hamumu/robot-wants-ice-cream)

Or this meta-side scroller, Continuity
[http://www.kongregate.com/games/glimajr/continuity](http://www.kongregate.com/games/glimajr/continuity)

Traditional RTSes are not well represented in web games...

~~~
babuskov
And there goes an hour (with Continuity). Thanks :)

------
puzzlingcaptcha
OK, so how does it work. Native code compiled to asm.js somehow?

~~~
azakai
Yes, the ports use emscripten to convert to JavaScript/asm.js.

~~~
zal-any
Do you know how much overhead it introduce? I'm curious.

~~~
azakai
Unity just launched a benchmark that can help answer that,

[http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/10/07/benchmarking-unity-
perfo...](http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/10/07/benchmarking-unity-performance-
in-webgl/)

It does run somewhat slower in a browser compared to native, but the
difference is really not very big.

To put it another way, the differences between browsers are about the same
size as the difference between the fastest browser and native. So it's in the
right ballpark.

~~~
jamesaguilar
Programs might run a third as fast, but most of these games are not so taxing
as to even use a third of a modern computer's resources. So they work fine in
the browser.

~~~
CmonDev
Did you try the Voxatron one?

~~~
jamesaguilar
Yep, although my computer is fairly advanced, so maybe that would not work so
well on a slow computer.

------
YokoZar
Some of these games use data files for user save data - what's the story with
them? Do they migrate with, say, Firefox sync?

~~~
Fuzzwah
I believe the Humble Player handles this for many of these games.

From the related article about the process of porting Aaaaaa to asm.js;

"Lastly you’ll want to think about ways to allow your data to persist across
multiple browsers on different machines. Gamers don’t always sit on the same
machine to play their games, which is why many services allow for cloud save
functionality. The same goes for the Web, and if you can build a system (like
the wonderfully talented Edward Rudd created for the Humble Player, it will
help the overall web experience for the player."

[https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/10/unity-games-in-webgl-
owlch...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/10/unity-games-in-webgl-owlchemy-
labs-conversion-of-aaaaa-to-asm-js/)

~~~
newscracker
I did a quick read of the above link. Does it imply, for this bundle, that
users have to be connected to play these games (due to the larger sizes and
also to use the game save function)? To put it in other words, can users do a
one-off download and play these games offline wherever and whenever they want
to?

~~~
Excavator
Don't know about game saves but a quick check in offline mode and playing
works once downloaded. The data is stored in IndexedDB, which allows for
storage up to 50MB before permission is required.

------
ZeroGravitas
I'm just glad Mozilla found an easy way to remind me that I like them and
should give them some money.

------
androidb
That's a great package, but what I don't get is why the "mozilla bundle" name
if this works just as well on Chrome?

~~~
benaiah
My guess is that, while the games technically run on chrome, they require the
asm.js optimizations that only Firefox has atm in order to run at a decent
speed.

~~~
cossovich
Chrome (and Opera) optimised for asm.js a little while ago[1]. I would expect
equivalent performance.

1\. [https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2013/11/26/chrome-
an...](https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2013/11/26/chrome-and-opera-
optimize-for-mozilla-pioneered-asm-js/)

------
dancole
>> Pay more than the average of $4.56 to unlock!

I find that to be an interesting idea, since the average will only increase
over time.

~~~
Fuzzwah
I've bought a number of humble bundles and have noticed that there is
generally a steady rise in price over the first day of a bundle being
announced. For example when I bought this bundle the unlock price was $4.18.

What works well for them is including another "premium" title at about twice
the opening unlock price; Democracy 3 for $8 in this case.

I'd guess that the unlock price will rise to around $6 over the course of the
day.

------
Ygg2
For some reason the _Aaaaaaa! for the awesome_ game has the screen blank out
after a short while. I'm using Nightly, so that is probably expected. Anyone
had similar problems?

~~~
Excavator
Try having the web console (Ctrl+Shift+K) open and see if you get any hints
there.

~~~
Ygg2
I'm getting a bunch of error. Main error seems to be out of memory exception
(6 tabs take 1.2GB).

------
TazeTSchnitzel
Anyone else unable to rename crew members in FTL? I can press backspace to
delete characters in names, but not letters to add characters! (Firefox, OS X)

------
thisandthat
Does anyone know what javascript libraries they're using for games like
voxeltron?

~~~
jonnyscholes
Not sure if this is what they're using but there is VoxelJS[1] - it has a very
healthy plugin ecosystem so you can get a functioning game up and running
quite quickly.

[http://voxeljs.com/](http://voxeljs.com/)

~~~
bananaoomarang
VoxelJS is really cool, but not quite really suited to building something like
Voxatron. You could however probably use straight ThreeJS, or go lib-less and
roll your own WebGL system.

These games are all compiled from native languages to asm.js.

------
wildpeaks
Oh sweet there is a WebGL version of Osmos, loved that one on mobile a few
years ago.

