When I was a teenager(?) at Facepunch Forums, I wrote Half-Life 2: Sandbox as a free and open source competitor to the by-then commercial version of Garry’s Mod.
It drove me nuts that GMod multiplayer games were declining rapidly in quality over the years and I wanted my own platform that had faster load times, better out of the box game mode experiences and so on. And I actually did it.
Due to some licensing agreement change issues with Valve, I ended up not taking it to the storefront.
But prior to that, I didn’t spend enough time marketing the mod anyway. Those who knew about it seemed to pass along some encouraging words, which was nice.
These days I work on Planimeter’s Grid Engine instead, and I have the freedom to do new things with it. But of course, new is always hard.
Anyway all that to say this reminds me of Minecraft, which is obviously a fun game. And if this has Lua and some proper bindings, it’s gonna be a blast. I’m sure it already is.
But it’s hell on earth trying to get people to play a game that is a spiritual derivative—of another well-established game.
Have fun developing this. But do it for you. Like I did Half-Life 2: Sandbox for me. All these years later, my mod still runs better than even the latest version of GMod. It does that because I put more care into it.
But since the Source SDK 2013 base is frozen in time, and there’s no usable Source 2 SDK, no one plays it. But that’s OK. I had fun.
In a similar manner, I sort of wish there would have been someone from the gaming generation before me, maybe a Quakeworld player, who would have passed on the same insight.
Projects this large will take years of your life in development time. You only get to work on some many of them. Ask yourself if you want to see yourself working on this in 5-10 years, or a similar title.
We love each day we spend working on this, so yes we definitely see ourselves working on it in 5 - 10 years. ^^
You're right about about the fact it may be hard to sell spiritual derivative at the beginning.
We realized many Minecraft players only play for a few weeks when there's a major update (~once a year). Mainly because of the lack of renewed content and the lack of very diverse experiences. This is where Roblox excels.
We want Particubes to become an alternative for them, when they're done playing Minecraft and still want to play in a familiar environment where they can interact with everything.
We're still big Minecraft fans ourselves (as players and server admins). Particubes is a way to fix some of our own frustrations with it, but will end up being a very different product.
Also, sorry to read about the licensing agreement issues with Valve. :(
We thought about building a good scripting environment for Minecraft instead of building our own engine, but depending on it felt risky, and since we're in for the long run...
Looks very similar to Minetest (https://www.minetest.net/) (Edit: but this is nonfree and hasn’t yet been ported to GNU/Linux, while Minetest has and also works on 3 BSDs). Although Minetest does not include built in tools for asset creation — most models, textures, and scripts seem to be made in Blender, GIMP, and standard text editors — there is a mod to convert in-game builds into models (edit: including textures in the future: https://content.minetest.net/packages/random_geek/meshport/ / https://github.com/random-geek/meshport) and mesecons’s (https://mesecons.net/) Luacontroller block allows you to type and run Lua in-game without restarting.
The main problem with minetest it is that it seems not complete/done on the art assets and main game, and the devs always say that is intentionally not a Minecraft clone yet people come searching one on the subgames.
Damn I saw the title and thought this would be a solution for easily making realtime multiplayer games, got so excited because it's really very difficult right now. But this is more like roblox or something, not a tool for setting up a realtime server to sync data across clients.
Devs out there: if you make something like firebase that lets you realtime sync in-memory server data (instead of db data like firebase) among clients in a cost-efficient way such that it's viable for multiplayer browser games and mobile apps, there are a lot of people who would pay for it. Me most of all. I would pay $100+/mo on a starter plan for it, even before I scaled.
You really have to have serious technical chops to do this well right now, and it's a big barrier to entry.
The 19yo who wrote Agar.io single-handedly is nothing short of a savant.
I wrote a minecraft clone with full physics sim, and networked multiplayer synced state between all clients. I had to spend a LOT of time on the multiplayer physics state propagation, it requires perfect clock synchronization, both client and server side predictions, interpolations, extrapolations and render-interpolations to maintain smoothness with hundreds of physics objects tumbling and flying around after explosions etc. It's extremely complicated and it's not going to help just having some sort of cloud SDK replicating an in-game memory area unfortunately.
But if your goal is not networked physics, it's certainly a much more simple problem!
I had been working on this project https://github.com/Fluffy9/Zenbase. I've been trying to figure out what it's good for and making an Agar.io like game is one thing I've started on. Combined with the nts library here to synchronize the clocks of devices https://github.com/gundb/gaming, I think it would be possible
Have you come across Nakama? https://heroiclabs.com/nakama. It's available as a paid service, or free to self host. It integrates nicely with engines like Unity / Unreal, but is equally usable for a browser based game.
Are you wanting something like a cloud-based ... browser/cache basically a users localstorage/db/browser data would be synched in the same format in the cloud?
How are you imagining this? (Burned out dev, looking for a side project).
This is cool. I'm working on something similar called enu (https://github.com/dsrw/enu), but you're further along than I am.
A few suggestions that may or may not be helpful:
- I realize that this is a big part of your esthetic, but blocky "game fonts" are hard to read. They're fine for games, but for editing code I want a normal monospace font rendered at a normal DPI.
- I feel like there should be a way to apply code changes without a full Publish. It's nice to test a change without resetting the entire world.
- Your docs are off to a good start, but it's really not clear to me how everything comes together. A more in depth example would be more helpful at this point than API docs, I think.
This looks... really cool. Good luck! I love the concept of an open game development platform , and especially the automatic multiplayer. I hope this succeeds.
I'm part of the dot big bang team and just want to note that we're absolutely a platform.
Our aim is to be a place where people can play games but also one where anyone can make games. We're in the process of unlocking the first stage for the gameplay side of that by releasing our TypeScript based scripting API soon.
Particubes looks great too and it's cool to see so many companies popping up in this space.
It’s not too much work to make it work with wasm, adding web browser support.
The app is very small (~30MB), it’s definitely something we want to do in the future.
But Linux will be supported before that.
Game servers and our CI already run on Linux.
[+] [-] andrewmcwatters|5 years ago|reply
It drove me nuts that GMod multiplayer games were declining rapidly in quality over the years and I wanted my own platform that had faster load times, better out of the box game mode experiences and so on. And I actually did it.
Due to some licensing agreement change issues with Valve, I ended up not taking it to the storefront.
But prior to that, I didn’t spend enough time marketing the mod anyway. Those who knew about it seemed to pass along some encouraging words, which was nice.
These days I work on Planimeter’s Grid Engine instead, and I have the freedom to do new things with it. But of course, new is always hard.
Anyway all that to say this reminds me of Minecraft, which is obviously a fun game. And if this has Lua and some proper bindings, it’s gonna be a blast. I’m sure it already is.
But it’s hell on earth trying to get people to play a game that is a spiritual derivative—of another well-established game.
Have fun developing this. But do it for you. Like I did Half-Life 2: Sandbox for me. All these years later, my mod still runs better than even the latest version of GMod. It does that because I put more care into it.
But since the Source SDK 2013 base is frozen in time, and there’s no usable Source 2 SDK, no one plays it. But that’s OK. I had fun.
In a similar manner, I sort of wish there would have been someone from the gaming generation before me, maybe a Quakeworld player, who would have passed on the same insight.
Projects this large will take years of your life in development time. You only get to work on some many of them. Ask yourself if you want to see yourself working on this in 5-10 years, or a similar title.
[+] [-] aduermael|5 years ago|reply
We love each day we spend working on this, so yes we definitely see ourselves working on it in 5 - 10 years. ^^
You're right about about the fact it may be hard to sell spiritual derivative at the beginning.
We realized many Minecraft players only play for a few weeks when there's a major update (~once a year). Mainly because of the lack of renewed content and the lack of very diverse experiences. This is where Roblox excels.
We want Particubes to become an alternative for them, when they're done playing Minecraft and still want to play in a familiar environment where they can interact with everything.
We're still big Minecraft fans ourselves (as players and server admins). Particubes is a way to fix some of our own frustrations with it, but will end up being a very different product.
Also, sorry to read about the licensing agreement issues with Valve. :( We thought about building a good scripting environment for Minecraft instead of building our own engine, but depending on it felt risky, and since we're in for the long run...
[+] [-] cnity|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boogies|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] huachimingo|5 years ago|reply
Main video: https://youtu.be/ztAg643gJBA More in depth: https://youtu.be/joFWr3JzBOI
The main problem with minetest it is that it seems not complete/done on the art assets and main game, and the devs always say that is intentionally not a Minecraft clone yet people come searching one on the subgames.
[+] [-] marcodiego|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaxx|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aerovistae|5 years ago|reply
Devs out there: if you make something like firebase that lets you realtime sync in-memory server data (instead of db data like firebase) among clients in a cost-efficient way such that it's viable for multiplayer browser games and mobile apps, there are a lot of people who would pay for it. Me most of all. I would pay $100+/mo on a starter plan for it, even before I scaled.
You really have to have serious technical chops to do this well right now, and it's a big barrier to entry.
The 19yo who wrote Agar.io single-handedly is nothing short of a savant.
[+] [-] MikeLumos|5 years ago|reply
Godot also makes it very easy to export games to be run in the browser.
[+] [-] l33tman|5 years ago|reply
But if your goal is not networked physics, it's certainly a much more simple problem!
[+] [-] AMerePotato|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ringspun|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gremlinsinc|5 years ago|reply
Are you wanting something like a cloud-based ... browser/cache basically a users localstorage/db/browser data would be synched in the same format in the cloud?
How are you imagining this? (Burned out dev, looking for a side project).
[+] [-] nicholasluimy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsrw|5 years ago|reply
A few suggestions that may or may not be helpful:
- I realize that this is a big part of your esthetic, but blocky "game fonts" are hard to read. They're fine for games, but for editing code I want a normal monospace font rendered at a normal DPI.
- I feel like there should be a way to apply code changes without a full Publish. It's nice to test a change without resetting the entire world.
- Your docs are off to a good start, but it's really not clear to me how everything comes together. A more in depth example would be more helpful at this point than API docs, I think.
I'll definitely keep an eye on this. Nice work!
[+] [-] hazz99|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aduermael|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] luadigest|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aduermael|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aodj|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meheleventyone|5 years ago|reply
Our aim is to be a place where people can play games but also one where anyone can make games. We're in the process of unlocking the first stage for the gameplay side of that by releasing our TypeScript based scripting API soon.
Particubes looks great too and it's cool to see so many companies popping up in this space.
[+] [-] aduermael|5 years ago|reply