TIGSource Forums

Hi Guys,

I would like to introduce this little experiment of mine, called VoidDust.
I develop it in my spare time, so please  :beg: pardon all the flaws.

It's still in embrional stage, but I work on it whenever I can.

The whole thing is programmed for the web, using HTML5. Also it's a one man band project, and working on the client and the server side as well as design takes time.

That's why I would love to get ideas and feedback from the community!
I also maintain a small devblog in the website so if you're curious about some implementation details, you can find them in there.

If you want to try it, jump in : )

www.voiddust.com (http://www.voiddust.com)

Pretty fancy just went and cleared the whole map.
I do have to say mouse clicking for firing when I can't use the mouse to aim is frustrating.
Along with it only being mouse up and you cant hold the trigger down to continuously fire.

and as I wrote this I ran into other users which was awesome, fighting them but I did see latency issues with people jumping around and do the bullets wrap around? Lots of weird bullets coming from everywhere started appearing when the other users was firing

This is a beautiful game. The game map is small, but the universe actually feels massive and I got a pretty good high just from drifting around and seeing the planets just fly by. Y'know, in that "Wheeee!" sort of way.

I'd recommend considering multiple game maps in the future, and hoping from one to another using a wormhole or warp drive. If you want to allow your game to have a good outlet for community action, you're going to need one map as a hub world where no violent actions could take place and logged in users can chat. They can then warp to one of the other maps where actual shooting can take place.

My recommendation for a full game mode is to introduce asteroid hunting, similar to the original Atari game where they break into smaller and more chaotic chunks. This could keep the game interesting even if there are no other users logged in.

Thank you guys! : ) , that's really helpful!

@Jcup:
My Bad! You can fire also with the UP arrow. I wanted to hook more functionality there (like 2nd weapon with left / right ). I will definitely need to add some controls description.
I wasn't considering auto-fire, but I could do that, I'll experiment with both things, and eventually have a param on the weapon itself that says if its auto or single shot.

Latency is more interesting; I run everything on free server tiers, so eventually latency could be an issue. Once the game is more ready and I get more feedback about it, I will start to spin a paid server instance, which should provide more bandwidth.
But that's just the tip of the iceberg. I will definitely have to improve the whole communication layer to prevent bad behaviour.

The problem here is that, while on FPS bullets are invisible (unless they are missiles, or big guns). You only calculate timestamp and then validate the point of impact after your dead reckoning.
Here I have actually to sync the bullet graphical behaviour across all the clients, which is a bit crazy, especially as Ships have inertia, so the whole positional coherence gets more complicated.

As you rightly noticed, it's more evident if you start to drift around as the inertia kicks in together with a quick rotational movement. States are sliced every 1/T seconds or based on major changes. I'll try to improve it, got few ideas, but small amount of time  :'(

@MW:
Thank you mate! I love to Wheeee around as well :P (... well ...) .
I'm working on a procedural generator so I can add more "sectors" to the universe.
After reading your post, I went back and implemented a Chat messaging system. It's not perfect, if you have suggestions, please go ahead!
I'm going to add harvesting / mining soon, I'm working on the inventory system :)

Neutral zones are interesting also, that would be cool to see if people can manage to self control once there are different ship types.

All in all, thank you again ! Any more ideas keep them coming : ), cheers,

*crash*

Hmm, all I saw was a black background and the text field in the bottom. When clicking I hear some sound.

Safari 5.1.5 on OS X Lion

HTML5 games normally work.

Thank you Eigen, I will double check, it is possible that it was still loading assets. It seems like the hosting is not behaving properly for loading, I will have to separate data storage asap to an S3 bucket, this should allow for faster downloading of the assets.

I was also adding sounds this weekend, so the track streaming may not be perfect if my instance is spun-off.

By the way definitely thank you for the feedback, I'll look into the issue.

:)

Just gave this a spin.  I love HTML5 games!

I'd definitely look into adding a loader so you can wait until the assets are there before you start the game rolling.

Bullets seemed to start very far from my ship, so it was a little weird, so you could get very close to a ship and shoot 'through' it.  Likewise, explosions didn't always happen near the ships.  Have you considered particle effects for the deaths?

Art is cool, and your minimap is easy to read.  I'd like to turn a lot faster---could be built in, or an upgrade from the store.

I love the game! The physics work perfectly and make it feel like you're... well... in space!

Although I did encounter an issue where explosions wouldn't be anywhere near the thing that exploded.

Guys, thank you a lot for the Feedback :).
I'm quite enjoying the community, and I'm super intrigued by others projects!

It's finally gonna be weekend again, so I will have some time to upload some new features.

I'll see if I can fix all the things you listed.

Btw, what do you think will be cooler for the next release?
1) Additional weapon
2) Big alien ship with a lot of hit points that actually fires back
3) Inventory with items collection + registering (so your state gets persistent, like kills, deaths, objects, and so on)

Also very interesting I got a few hundred connections per day now, which is starting to help with tuning the metrics on the backend side!
I finally have some data to fix latency issues, so again a big thank you :).

*crashed*

Just uploaded a new version :)

Let me know what you think guys, also for people that tested it before, can you please let me know if there are noticeable performance boosts?

It should render way faster than before.

*crash*