Humble Mozilla Bundle

[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?

[mstange]

Nightly and Aurora Firefox builds actually support the "code" field on keyboard events, which lets JS know which physical key was pressed on the keyboard. For example, when a Dvorak user presses the key that would be W on a QWERTY layout (for moving forwards in a game), you'll get a keydown event with e.key == "," and e.code == "KeyW".

I'd really like to know what the spec status on that is, and whether other browsers implement it.

[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.

[dkersten]

Totally agree. As a Colemak user, nothing irritates me more than key bindings that assume qwerty. If games don't either work with the physical keys (scancodes rather than character codes, I guess?), then at least let me rebind the keys, otherwise I can't play the game.

[w-ll]

I don't believe you can actually identify what the keyboard layout is in a browser. But I agree, key bindings should be configurable. Im an old ESDF quake player.

[adnzzzzZ]

It really isn't that hard to add configurable key bindings to a game, just laziness on part of developers.

[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/

[pdknsk]

> Otherwise it should hit all Firefox users' about:home page within the next 24 hours.

That's a massive promotion for Humble. Wow.

[balls187]

Did you create Osmos, the game?

[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.

[baby]

Super Hexagon will make you waste time like never before as well... Until you finish it. It really is something, the end is like a firework.

[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.

[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.

[daxelrod]

The demos all appear to use asm.js .

Also see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8454768

[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...

[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?

[azakai]

Mozilla is a nonprofit whose goal is to promote the web. So it is very important that this runs well on Firefox, Chrome, and on all other modern browsers - if it didn't, this would be pointless for Mozilla to do.

Mozilla helped out here, but the goal is to show that games on the web can be fun, and of course that means anywhere the web can run, in any browser.

edit: the distinction is also noticeable in that this is the Humble Mozilla Bundle, and not Humble Firefox Bundle.

[yohui]

Well, Mozilla is Humble's partner for this bundle, receiving a cut of the revenue, and asm.js is their work.

Plus, Chrome users can benefit from Mozilla's work, too, just as Firefox users may appreciate Google. It's the "Mozilla Bundle", not the "Firefox Bundle", after all.

[Igglyboo]

In addition to some money going to mozilla, asm.js was also designed by mozilla.

[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.

[iends]

Some of the money is going to the Mozilla Foundation.

[thirdtruck]

Some of what you pay goes to the Mozilla Foundation by default.

[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.

[akavel]

Not necessarily, people can pay less than average, they might not be interested in the "unlockable" games.

[Audiophilip]

Not necessarily, because I assume not everyone buys the unlockables, so the average could move downwards, too.

[ben0x539]

Will it? As I understand it people can pay $0.01 and just get everything else and no steam keys.

[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.

[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/

[frik]

C++ game converted with emscripten to ASM.js, see above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8454988

[wildpeaks]

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