
WebSockets and WebGL used to create multiplayer shoot'em up - jamesaustin
https://turbulenz.com/games/scorerush-mp/multiplayer
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willvarfar
Neat! Would love to know how you handle prediction and correction.

My last ludum dare was webgl+websockets, but because I used server lockstep
(it being a 72hr game and coded from scratch) it was pretty poorly received :/

[http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2012/08/30/cage-flight-
autops...](http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2012/08/30/cage-flight-autopsy/)
<\-- give it some love

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kevingadd
Runs pretty smooth and the multiplayer seems to work fine (though Quick Play
dropped me into an empty game the first time). Giving the bullets a black
outline is a good move because I cannot make sense of the rest of the visuals
- horribly low contrast and super noisy, almost random use of color.

Seems to play pretty well other than the issues created by the indecipherable
visuals though. I think multiplayer makes this kind of game more engaging, but
you need to take steps to overcome the visual confusion and tendency to be
overwhelmed when there are 4 players worth of bullets and special effects
flying around the screen.

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gavanwoolery
Yeah visuals are confusing, here is how I would fix it:

Make each players view of the game unique such that it is easiest to decipher
where their ship is, and where incoming bullets are. So the player's ship
could be bright white, the harmfull bullets bright red or orange, and
everything else a darker color. What the next player sees is different - a
view designed to distinguish _their own_ ship, and player 1's ship is dark.
Make sense?

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benvio
Thanks for the ideas and thoughts, I'll link the team to this post :)

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tinco
Please don't, isn't the whole idea of geometry wars that the difficulty comes
from the visual chaos?

If everything was super clear the whole challenge of the game would be
reduced..

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tinco
Damn pretty great, I played a Geometry Wars game together with some other
people, no lag, no glitches the entire game. And a whole bunch of nice
animations and effects.

This shows that at least for the arcade market, the web really has become a
mature platform. Ofcourse, this game was cooperative, and chaos-y. It's not
certain at all this kan be made feasible for competitive multiplayer with more
strict rules.

Maybe that just means it's restricted to fun games ;)

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jrogers65
The small print (<http://biz.turbulenz.com/developers>):

>We're sorry to hear that. Publishing with Turbulenz gets your game in front
of a larger audience. We don't charge an upfront fee and we expect to help you
achieve higher user and revenue numbers. If you still don't want us to publish
it, contact us about alternative licensing options.

>Our mission is to create the greatest online gaming experience. We have
heavily invested in the tools and technology to enable this experience and
provide these to you free of charge. In exchange, we receive a 30% fee for
helping you publish and promote your games to millions of potential customers
globally. In fact, we take it a step further and provide services other online
platforms don’t. For example, we take care of hosting, servers, analytics,
marketing, payment processing, and we even provide developers with a live
staging service (Developer Hub) to A/B test and optimize different development
versions of a game.

So they're going for an app store model by using a free API as bait.

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benvio
You can use an Xbox 360 gamepad if you've got one lying about :)

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corysama
Didn't seem to work for me in Chrome, but did work in Chrome Canary.

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FuzzyDunlop
You might have to enable a setting in chrome://flags in normal Chrome.

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AYBABTME
This is cool and it works well.

However the graphics are giving me a headache. I played for 10 minutes and I
quickly couldn't find my mouse's cursor, nor distinguish between enemies and
the background, enemies and the rewards, and enemies from myself. Too many
colors.

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pirateking
Not quite Ikaruga level yet, but quite impressive and the gameplay is good. It
could feel almost like a whole new game with re-done artwork.

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seanica
It was fun, but sometimes _really_ hard to determine if I was actually
participating in the game or just spectating!

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tgb
Great fun! I registered for an account, but then stopped being able to play
multiplayer games. Maybe I'm just missing it, but there "quickplay" button
that I was using as a guest is no longer there.

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jamesaustin
Make sure you're playing "Score Rush MP" which is the multiplayer version. You
might have accidentally started the original single player version. Select the
game from the "Games" dropbox in the top right of the website.

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tgb
Thanks, that fixed it.

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rartichoke
The usability is awful. Too many graphics blend in together and the hot key
choices are confusing.

However it's ridiculously smooth and ran great on a ~5 year old machine. The
controls felt excellent.

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jon6
Is there a youtube video?

I found this <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDGl-eDEuNQ> but I'm not sure if
its the same game.

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mslot
Not sure what was doing, but it was kind of fun. What I'm really hoping for
now is multi-player pong (with up to 32 rotating pong bats).

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htc
I played with some of the effects tunned down and it was less chaotic. Great
game.

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arcatek
Is there a technical reason for not using webgl frameworks such as Three.js ?

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jamesaustin
The game uses the Turbulenz Engine which includes a WebGL graphics framework
(which is equivalent to Three.js) -
<http://biz.turbulenz.com/developers#turbulenz-engine>

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10098
Doesn't work in Firefox

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benvio
If you've got a moment it'd be good to know your configuration. My default
answer is to recommend Chrome, but all versions of Firefox are supported (for
those without WebGL support we provide a small plugin as an alternative).

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10098
Actually, now I can see the menu, but neither "quick play" nor "create game"
work. Says "Something has gone wrong - please try again". Firefox 16.02 on
Windows 7.

Music is great though :)

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sahat
Impressive. This is the most fun HTML5 games that I played.

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digeridoo
Nice, I've been looking forward to seeing games like this.

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rrbrambley
This. Is. Awesome.

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camus
Great but the action is a bit too chaotic , to much things on screen. I
suggest reducing the sprite sizes a bit , and make the background less
distracting.

