next »

[Jacob_]

(I know the name is bad, I'm uncreative)

I'm a fan of Minecraft, and always wondered what would happen on an infinite server, so I decided to try something similar.



Build stuff! It is coded with JavaScript, AJAX, and PHP, no downloading required.

The world size is only limited by my web hosts's HD space - if you scroll to a section that isn't generated yet, the server will generate it for you. The world is stored in 26x20 chunks, each is 4-6KB.

I'd like to see how this will turn out, not sure if there will be a well-built city, a bunch of pixel art, or just random spam. Feedback would be appreciated!

Credit for inspiration goes to Minecraft, Drawball, and PlayPen, not that I'm trying to compete with any of those.

[Jacob_]

(I know the name is bad, I'm uncreative)

I'm a fan of Minecraft, and always wondered what would happen on an infinite server, so I decided to try something similar.



Build stuff! It is coded with JavaScript, AJAX, and PHP, no downloading required.

The world size is only limited by my web hosts's HD space - if you scroll to a section that isn't generated yet, the server will generate it for you. The world is stored in 26x20 chunks, each is 4-6KB.

I'd like to see how this will turn out, not sure if there will be a well-built city, a bunch of pixel art, or just random spam. Feedback would be appreciated!

Credit for inspiration goes to Minecraft, Drawball, and PlayPen, not that I'm trying to compete with any of those.

You can now drag the mouse, which makes building a lot easier, but I might have to remove that feature if it makes griefing too easy.

[Indievelopper]

idea's good, except that playpen is better, but you could turn that into something better.

[Hempuli‽]

idea's good, except that playpen is better, but you could turn that into something better.

Way to go, polite criticism!

I really like it, but the scrolling is a bit annoying due to it's slowness. you should make a permanent bar where players could choose their tiles, to make it easier to drop into the game.

[Massena]

It'd be great if you could improve scrolling speed, but I can see how that could be very hard.
Also, I'd like it if I could scroll with the keyboard.

Great job so far!

[Jacob_]

I just added keyboard scrolling, wasn't too hard. If you get into the right rhythm (yes, that's what she said) you can actually get it to scroll quite fast while still updating the screen.

Right now the scrolling isn't too efficient, it redownloads the whole screen, not just the part that needs to be updated (about 5KB, plus processing time). A better way would be to only get the section that wasn't visible before, but the code for that could get complicated, and the processing time might be too great. This is the first JS game I've made, so I'm not too good at the fancy stuff yet.

I've had my first griefing already, someone drew a penis peeing on the starter house

[Mr. Yapper]

I saw this earlier and my first impression was "huh? He's just copying playpen"

I just checked it and it's awesome. Although both of them allow players to create the world together, Playpen is more of a point-and-click adventure thing, and this isn't. So I apologise for what I was thinking!

Great idea - I can see this being a lot of fun. I'll try and get my friends to check it out too and see what we can make.

EDIT: Would there be any way to make the scrolling smoother?

EDIT 2: What about an option with a bigger window?

EDIT 3: Discovered a slightly annoying thing - blocks are being drawn when the mouse button isn't being held

[Jacob_]

I saw this earlier and my first impression was "huh? He's just copying playpen"

I just checked it and it's awesome. Although both of them allow players to create the world together, Playpen is more of a point-and-click adventure thing, and this isn't. So I apologise for what I was thinking!

Great idea - I can see this being a lot of fun. I'll try and get my friends to check it out too and see what we can make.

EDIT: Would there be any way to make the scrolling smoother?

EDIT 2: What about an option with a bigger window?

EDIT 3: Discovered a slightly annoying thing - blocks are being drawn when the mouse button isn't being held

I could make a bigger window, but it would probably make the scrolling even worse.

I noticed the mouse thing too. It seems that sometimes, firefox isn't calling the onMouseUp event when it should, if you click again it fixes it.

Also, IE has some bugs with the click and drag painting, there's another reason to switch to a better browser

Edit: Looks like some people are confused, if you delete the dirt underground it automatically turns gray. You don't need to use the gray block, which is a slightly different shade.

[Mr. Yapper]

I really don't know anything about this sort of thing... but what about loading more of the world at a time, even bits you can't see, so you can scroll around smoothly for a bit without having to see the loading message as much?

[Indievelopper]

idea's good, except that playpen is better, but you could turn that into something better.

Way to go, polite criticism!

I really like it, but the scrolling is a bit annoying due to it's slowness. you should make a permanent bar where players could choose their tiles, to make it easier to drop into the game.

Sorry i didn't felt like being impolite, i've written a longer comment, about the slow scrolling but i closed the page and got bored to write it again.

I really don't know anything about this sort of thing... but what about loading more of the world at a time, even bits you can't see, so you can scroll around smoothly for a bit without having to see the loading message as much?

Good reaction for (i suppose) a non developper, but this would actually suck the bandwidth even more which would make the whole thing worst...etc.
Discussed about that with farbs for playpen already

[Jacob_]

Sorry about the downtime, was making optimizations:
-When you scroll it only downloads the part it needs to, not the whole screen.
-Reduced the number of loops used (it was kind of redundant)
-Negative array indices are now handled by putting an "n" in front rather than the +100,000 crap I was doing before, this reduced the size a bit.

However, if there is any speed increase at all, it's hardly detectable. I think the main bottleneck is just the initial connection to the server.

Like Indievelopper said, having it download stuff in the background would reduce the lag, but would also suck up my bandwith (I only get 15GB per month, and I run other sites off the same hosting account)

[Farr]

Creating these kinds of games in the browser must be quite challenging. Bandwidth appears to be something that you're worried about. Personally for those conservation purposes that you are going for, the game seems to fun as it is. The load time may be more upfront than the usual background loading in games, but the block placement and design is smooth. You gave me some fun. 

[Jacob_]

I made the scrolling better by implementing preloading; when you visit a new place or scroll it buffers enough to let you scroll 2 more times in any direction. However, it's still possible to scroll faster than your computer can download, so holding down the arrow keys doesn't work too well.

It caches places you have been to; use the new reload button to refresh an area from the server.

There are still some bugs, like random empty boxes appearing, just use the reload button or scroll again to fix them.

[Navineous]

OMFG it's Jacob_, I know you from your CTF server on minecraft. Anyway awesome game mate! Cheers. 

[Jacob_]

Here is an image of the known world: http://1scripts.net/pics/world.gif (massive picture warning)

As you can see, some people are creative, some are unoriginal, and some are just rude.

[guille]

This is a really nice concept, I liked the whole world picture, would be cool if you could retrieve it at any time in realtime (maybe not possible, I know).

I think building a simple game around this concept would be pretty awesome. Like, anyone could just get there and make a simple level just for fun and you would have a new level to play on everytime you get to the page.

Inspiring, makes you think in all the possibilities... 

[Navineous]

Make it interactive like maybe a block you put your cursor over and it says text? Or maybe a block you click and it will lead you to a different place on the map.