

Rocket Engine - plugin-free browser game development - pufuwozu
http://rocketpack.fi/engine/

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jasonkester
It's not a product. It's a landing page.

Could we stop voting stuff like this onto the front page? I'm sure it'll be
cool when they actually build it, but right now it's just an hour's worth of
brainstorming and 20 minutes of somebody's time in photoshop. There's
absolutely nothing to see, so it's not of any value to us now.

I know that everybody considers this as a Minimum Viable Product, and that
you're supposed to launch something like this for every idea you have. That's
cool. And I know you're supposed to get as much exposure to it as you can.

But please please please, don't spam up HackerNews with stuff like this. I
want to think we're better than that.

Can we make a policy of only submitting things that exist?

~~~
aakour
Hi Jason, I'm the head of development at Rocket Pack.

The reason we did the video and the website is because the product exists, and
we're now at the point where we'd like to get a few pilot projects with other
game development companies going.

We've been working hard on this for half a year now. If you can accomplish the
same in 20 minutes with Photoshop, more power to you.

~~~
jasonkester
By all means, put something out that we can play with then. I can't come up
with any reason why you'd lock this away behind a landing page if it's even at
alpha quality.

Let it out to the world. People will use it. People will tell you what you
need to do before you can release it as a product. It's amazing how much good
feedback you can get just by letting people try your thing out.

You're doing yourself a disservice by disguising your thing as vaporware if it
actually exists.

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cmelbye
Ah, a feature chart... The source to Unity3D _is_ available, and it also has a
very comprehensive iPhone deployment option. Apps made with Unity3D are still
being approved. Unity also released version 2.1 a few months ago that added a
ton of features for MMO games: <http://unity3d.com/unity/whats-
new/unity-2.1.html>

~~~
nailer
Unity 3d is plugin based. It uses Silverlight or Moonlight or it's own plugin
if they're installed and working. This doesn't have that dependency.

OTOH, I suspect Unity3D's performance is much better, as most browsers don't
have GPU accelerated graphics yet.

~~~
cmelbye
I'm not saying that Unity3D is necessarily better, I'm just saying that their
feature chart is fairly inaccurate.

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jtagen
I wonder how will this runs once you have a half dozen independent objects
running around the screen. The extra layer provided by the browser (especially
on mobile devices) must cause an enormous hit.

From the movie, things look like they have serious lag.

I'm hoping this works, could be a great teaching tool.

~~~
bd
This technology is actually pretty fast. Drawing images is so fundamental for
browsers that it tends to be heavily optimized.

If your hardware runs well Google Maps, it will run well this engine (and also
the other very similar one - Aves from Dextrose). Rendering wise, it's the
same technology.

Most of heavy lifting is done by compiled code of the browser, JavaScript just
sets few parameters (as opposed to canvas, where you "micromanage" rendering
in relatively slow scripting language).

One screenful of map is about 80-100 images, though performance wise there is
still quite a lot of breathing room.

I did some stress tests and my notebook can easily handle many hundreds
individual image sprites (done as absolutely positioned DOM elements).

Now physics, this may be slow to do in JavaScript. But with a type of games
that work well with image sprites (basically anything where building blocks
are large), this will probably not make too big problems as you will not have
that many interacting objects (at once together at screen) and also
interaction will be optimizable.

The "killer app" will probably be tile based strategies or role-playing games
(see current top Facebook apps), so physics / pathfinding / AI would only need
to deal with discrete grids, not some costly pixel precise collision
detection.

~~~
teamonkey
JS physics library: <http://box2d-js.sourceforge.net/index2.html>

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Keyframe
I'd be happy to see a good canvas JS gamedev middleware. Only one I kind of
like, that I've seen, is Akihabara. Do you guys know more libraries worth
looking at?

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windsurfer
For an engine that's supposed to support mobile, it's sad how I can't submit
the "interested" form on my N900. Also odd that I need flash when it's plugin-
free.

~~~
aakour
Thanks for letting us know. Will fix the N900 situation ASAP. Flash is for the
embedded Youtube video, but I do appreciate the irony as well... -Jiri, Rocket
Pack

~~~
woodall
If the user's browser agent is known to support HTML5 use <video>, else use
<flash>.

~~~
moeffju
Use <video> with an <embed> / <object> fallback inside.

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viraptor
This actually reminds me of the old Klik&Play software
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klik>). I wonder if it's easy enough to use to
create a community of its own.

~~~
Jim_Neath
I used to love Games Factory and Klik&Play

~~~
dododo
the games factory is still underdevelopment, and you can download a demo of
the current version:

<http://www.clickteam.com/eng/tgf2.php>

(i'm also a fan. an web games factory would be awesome.)

~~~
reitzensteinm
MMF (by the same people) exports to Flash, so it's a reality already.

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ciupicri
Plugin-free, yet it looks like I need Flash to see the whole page. Also, I
don't see any demo/game.

~~~
jeza
Seems they embed a youtube video.

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swanson3
It seems the Aves Engine is more powerful at this point. At least the Video of
the dextrose guys shows a lot more stuff going on and it runs much smoother on
ipad from the video. Anyways, both seem to be commercial only products.

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aakour
FYI, we updated <http://rocketpack.fi/engine/> to use YouTube's HTML5 embed
code, which will hopefully make it easier for everyone to see the introduction
video.

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JimmyH
I wonder how they're going to handle sound effects and background music
without any plugins?

