Mozilla Releases HTML5 MMO BrowserQuest 138
New submitter rasmuswikman sends this quote from an announcement at hacks.mozilla.org:
"BrowserQuest is a tribute to classic video-games with a multiplayer twist. You play as a young warrior driven by the thrill of adventure. No princess to save here, just a dangerous world filled with treasures to discover. And it's all done in glorious HTML5 and JavaScript. Even better, it's open-source, so be sure to check out the source code on GitHub!"
Visual slashdotting. (Score:5, Funny)
I'm waiting to see thousands of new players enter the arena in real time. Should be interesting.
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Eh, disappointing turnout.
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While I was playing a moment ago, there were 74 players at peak (that I noted), and never fewer than 68-- in the same instance as me. Total online was 1700+.
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It says so on their blog also. not only several servers but multiple world instances per server.
It makes for a nicer game experience that way (and is technologically easier, not that the alternative would be unachievable)
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True, but I still would have expected at least a 50 character sudden jump given the subject matter (new open source MMO game in browser & 5 second character setup). What happened was it went from 72 to 74 in the 15 minutes I waited after the story hit the front page.
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They are operating the levels at a cap of approx 80 playing chars per instance from what I understand so new logins over the threshold would just automatically create new instances. I was on an instance though whose end game arena had some 20 ish /.ers
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Is running VERY slowly with 74 players on the server I ended up at ... and Firefox was complaining about scripts not responding.
Is pretty cool demo, but need more polishing.
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I had no problems at all with aurora. Could it be plugins?
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I'm waiting to see thousands of new players enter the arena in real time. Should be interesting.
I'm just waiting for one player.... me.
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This is a "hey, look what we can do!" maneuver. Sort of like: "In your face `chrome experiemnts' and `google IO app'". I don't recall anybody else demonstrating such a big part of HTML5 (graphics,sound,sockets) so successfully.
Props to Moz. for doing this.
Also a small point: This is how gaming should look like all along IMO, I don't want to have to install 18TB of data in order to start playing anything. Nor do I want to have to read through manuals and strategy guides before actually doing gameplay. Games
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I'm waiting to see someone explain WHY, for the love of Pete why?
To show that you don't need Flash to build realistic games. And open-source it as an incentive to companies to adopt free technologies -- that's the point of Mozilla -- open the web.
with ALL the trouble Mozilla has had lately, declining share,
The share has not been declining, actually growing in absolute numbers. The total number of web users is growing all the time. Mozilla isn't terribly worried if other open web browsers gain more share -- as long as there is a diverse market, it's good for the open web.
practically zero adoption in the mobile space
They are working on that -- the recent announcement on adopti
Can anyone connect? (Score:3)
I cannot. Just says "Connecting to Server.."
Is it slashdotted?
Re:Can anyone connect? (Score:5, Interesting)
You'll eventually get in. There seem to be different realms because I have two browsers open with different profiles and I see different players in each environment. But they seem to balance the players across the realms pretty well because the player count is close to the same in each one.
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I tried it in IE9 and it told me it wouldn't work because my browser didn't support Web Sockets.
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Their status page is located here: http://browserquest.mozilla.org/status/ [mozilla.org]
It shows population, distribution of players.
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This is what I see:
BrowserQuest Dashboard
Total players:
Literally. That's it.
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Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
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There's no such thing as a Zelda rip-off. Zelda itself was a rip-off.
Now get off my lawn.
You clearly have no clue about the history and impact of a game like Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
Having played it for hours, I can instantly recognize the graphic tiles. At the very least, *those* should have been changed..
I like it a lot, just it would be nice to see some credit to Myamoto..
Even so, I strongly advise you to get a life instead of trolling serious discussion on such a nice HTML5 game..
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There's no such thing as a Zelda rip-off. Zelda itself was a rip-off.
Now get off my lawn.
You clearly have no clue about the history and impact of a game like Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
Eh, I'd say he does. Consider the Ultima series, for example.
Now get off my lawn.
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you are not legally (or, some would say, morally) obligated to cite inspiration.
There are in fact laws requiring citation of sources. On the U.S. copyright registration form, for example, the author has to declare any "Material excluded from this claim (Material previously registered, previously published, or not owned by this claimant)". Trademark law likewise has a concept of "reverse passing off". Foreign trade law has country of origin labeling requirements.
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I know the ZLTTP tiles to heart and I can absolutely say these aren't the original tiles. I absolutely agree with the "inspiration" part, the "look&feel" is similar, but the tiles are original artwork.
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The `original zelda` is an NES game that runs @ 256x224/30 the sprites are 16^2 and some times even smaller. Everything looks like zelda at this resolution. Anyway, this isn't a game as much as proof of concept that a game like this can exist.
for reference:
Zelda screenshot [wikipedia.org]
NES video capabilities [wikipedia.org]
Nice job on the https link (Score:2)
Nice job linking with https to hacks.mozilla.org.
Firefox immediately starts whining about it.
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Worked well on my iPad. I think there might be some keyboard commands I can't get to? Enough to play the game pretty well.
This was a test (Score:1)
WebSocket (Score:1)
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IE 10 PP5 implements the websockets RFC.
IE 10 requires Windows 7 (Score:3)
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I thought the only use for IE is to download chrome or firefox?
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ftp.exe
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In my opinion WebSocket is the real technology we are waiting for building stuff on the internet that make people collaboration or play together. Having the ability of the server to push data to the client without having to get a pooling every x seconds or so is a big plus.
So basically, we've moved boldly forward from the bad old 1970s client-server days of raw TCP over IP, to the glorious new Web 3.0 days of TCP over HTTP over JavaScript over HTML over HTTP over TCP over IP. That's a.... win?
Yes it's a big win (Score:1)
Not a bad proof of concept, but... (Score:2)
Interesting use of Web technologies. But as a practical matter, isn't storing user progress data on the client side a really bad idea from an anti-cheating standpoint? How long until someone releases an editor?
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There are various suits you can get off monsters... one of them I got was a temporary fox suit that made you extra dodgy I think.
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"nyan","28357"
Also:
"rick","33544"
Not sure what the number means yet, but I'm going to find out!
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Not necessarily.
Storing it on the client and sending it back from the client to the server and having the server trust the client is a bad idea from that standpoint, but just storing it on the client isn't, as long as it is also stored on the server and the server doesn't get it from the client. The description isn't clear on the exact role o
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A simple hurdle for those wanting to hack... the client could send the server a hash of the local data, and compare it to the server hash to detect "cheating." Of course, you'd have to send the hole binary blob up to the server to do it so the client couldn't just fake the hash. On second thought, it sounds like a PITA. Just let them hack saves for a tech demo.
No, it isn't (digital signatures FTW) (Score:2)
It's possible to use the client for data storage but sign and/or encrypt all the data so that you know the client hasn't modified it.
This approach has actually been gaining momentum lately. For example, everyone knows that cookies shouldn't be used for storing important data (such as whether the client has logged in to a web service and what his user id is) so the traditional method is to store session data on the server and just store the session id in the cookie. However, play! [playframework.org] (a framework that finally
Cute, but a demo (Score:2)
I beat the final boss and got 17 out 20 achievements in about 15 minutes. I wasn't going to stick around to take 5000 damage or find the two hidden achievements.
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this.tryUnlockingAchievement("RICKROLLD");
}
the famous last words... (Score:2)
When you start to play, your browser opens up a WebSocket connection to one of several load-balanced game servers.
I guess they are all VIC-20s then, given how fast they got slashdotted.
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They're running NodeJS.
NodeJS: letting everyone write their own servers in Javascript like that's a good idea since whenever the hell it came out.
Mystery Achievement (Score:2)
Does any one know what the 'Mystery Achievement' is? I've got 19/20...
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don't answer that....
isn't stuff like this (Score:3)
supposed to be posted early in the morning, instead of at the end of the work day?
Built on bleeding edge technology (Score:5, Funny)
Threads, networking, sound, graphics...
What next?
Maybe someday, web developers will be on par with applications developers from the 70s!
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UNIX had multitasking since the 60s or 70s.
Granted, that's not exactly threads, but the difference is sufficiently small for it to matter.
My original statement didn't mean to be accurate anyway.
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You know that application developer does not necessarily mean "PC" or "microcomputer" developer, right?
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All threads are essentially are lightweight processes (some times they are even called LWPs). What a thread exactly is depends upon the implementation, sometimes it is shared memory, some times it is not, etc. Basically most operating systems before the 70's implemented processes that very much looked like what we'd call threads today.
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Not sure about the VIC-20 but the Atari VCS and HCS (Home Computer System) and Apple ][ came out in the 70s. ProLogic's "Flight Simulator" for the Atari HCS is a good example of a game that utilises multiple threads of execution to simulate flying a airplane via polygonal graphics. This is in contrast to most games that have a main thread and a background thread ran by the vertical blank interrupt.
(and perhaps a third ran by the horizontal blank interrupt)
And don't forget Texas Instruments' TI-99/4 (and
Does it have... (Score:2)
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Does it have a cheap plastic imitation of the Amulet of Yendor? I'm not interested if it doesn't have a cheap plastic imitation Amulet.
Greetings to a fellow CoCo-nut, you just killed my productivity for today.
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The cheap plastic imitation of the Amulet of Yendor is found on the fake bones pile on the "Rogue level" in NetHack, and sometimes also in real bones piles (when the former player died with either a cheap plastic amulet or the real AoY in his possession). The cheap plastic amulet is also what you get if you try to wish for the Amulet of Yendor. When not formally identified, it appears as "The Amulet of Yendor". Unlike the real Amulet, however, the cheap plastic one can b
Won in about 30 minutes (Score:2)
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Once you know where everything is you can sneak past the monsters in your T-shirt and get to an unguarded drop where you can get everything you need kill the Skeleton King in a couple of minutes. It is just a simple demonstration of the technology. As it is open source someone might make a dungeon with goo
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Four of the letters in their names are the same.
That's about it.
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I don't know how related Javascript is to Java
No relationship whatsoever beyond an idea to jump on the Java-bandwagon dreamed up by a marketer.
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I don't know how related Javascript is to Java but..
They are not related at all. The only similarity is that the performance of Javascript is not good either.
Re:Glorious Javascript (Score:5, Funny)
I don't know how related Javascript is to Java but the last Java game I played was Minecraft and the performance wasn't so glorious.
Prepare for an assault on two different borders! ;)
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Java's relation to Javascript is just the first four letters of the name.
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OT: The register page in your sig is broken:
Re:Glorious Javascript (Score:5, Funny)
They're about as similar as a Car and a Carpet
Re:Glorious Javascript (Score:5, Funny)
Ok then, they're about as similar as a Hamster and a Ham
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They both taste good when fried and chopped up in an omelet ?
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And then sold to you in that shape by a salesman who is certain it's the right shape for your square room.
Re:Glorious Javascript (Score:4, Funny)
Especially when it is carpet that uses dynamic variants and prototyping instead of strongly typed references and class based inheritance... am I doing this analogy thing right?
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A car can have a carpet. They are less related than that.
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How about Mozilla focus their resources on projects more to their core and worthwhile.
Why bother focusing on pointless browsers and mail clients when cancer is still uncured, killing thousands? Seems awfully selfish and inconsiderate to piss away ones time with these pointless endeavors when we still have AIDS, cancer, and other diseases. Who knows? Perhaps we could have had a cure for one or more of these if open-source efforts had been directed toward medical research.
Of course this would require you to actually think about someone other than yourselves.
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How about Mozilla focus their resources on projects more to their core and worthwhile.
Mozilla is kind of like Congress. It's nice to know they're spending time specifying a National Hamster Breed or color for the Senate carpet instead of spending time screwing up important stuff. When Firefox and Thunderbird got Good Enough (TM), programmers had to justify their jobs, so tons of terrible features got shoved down our throats with no option to disable some of them. Now Firefox is bloated like Mozilla (Seamonkey) was.
NoScript (Score:2)
Noscript for Firefox will provide you the necessary protection against any unwanted scripting (be it canvas, webgl, or whatever) from any non-white-listed website.
Alternatively, AdBlock will block interactive content from blacklisted providers (most ad servers).
With both, you get a nice clean Web 1.0. And activate the fun Javascript+DOM+CSS+HTML5+WebGL+Audio+LocalStore+... only for the sites you trust
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BrowserQuest 2: The Search for More Money