Rocket Engine - plugin-free browser game development

by pufuwozu • 16 years ago

70 31 16 years ago

jtagen• 16 years ago

I wonder how will this runs once you have a half dozen independent objects running around the screen. The extra layer provided by the browser (especially on mobile devices) must cause an enormous hit.

From the movie, things look like they have serious lag.

I'm hoping this works, could be a great teaching tool.

bd• 16 years ago

This technology is actually pretty fast. Drawing images is so fundamental for browsers that it tends to be heavily optimized.

If your hardware runs well Google Maps, it will run well this engine (and also the other very similar one - Aves from Dextrose). Rendering wise, it's the same technology.

Most of heavy lifting is done by compiled code of the browser, JavaScript just sets few parameters (as opposed to canvas, where you "micromanage" rendering in relatively slow scripting language).

One screenful of map is about 80-100 images, though performance wise there is still quite a lot of breathing room.

I did some stress tests and my notebook can easily handle many hundreds individual image sprites (done as absolutely positioned DOM elements).

Now physics, this may be slow to do in JavaScript. But with a type of games that work well with image sprites (basically anything where building blocks are large), this will probably not make too big problems as you will not have that many interacting objects (at once together at screen) and also interaction will be optimizable.

The "killer app" will probably be tile based strategies or role-playing games (see current top Facebook apps), so physics / pathfinding / AI would only need to deal with discrete grids, not some costly pixel precise collision detection.

teamonkey• 16 years ago

JS physics library: http://box2d-js.sourceforge.net/index2.html

ciupicri• 16 years ago

Plugin-free, yet it looks like I need Flash to see the whole page. Also, I don't see any demo/game.

jeza• 16 years ago

Seems they embed a youtube video.

viraptor• 16 years ago

This actually reminds me of the old Klik&Play software (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klik). I wonder if it's easy enough to use to create a community of its own.

Jim_Neath• 16 years ago

I used to love Games Factory and Klik&Play

dododo• 16 years ago

the games factory is still underdevelopment, and you can download a demo of the current version:

http://www.clickteam.com/eng/tgf2.php

(i'm also a fan. an web games factory would be awesome.)

ladon86• 16 years ago

Me too. I loved it so much that when I was 14 I helped organise the first "Click convention" and held it in my local village.

We got the developers over from France, and they still hold it in the UK every year, not far from my house.

windsurfer• 16 years ago

For an engine that's supposed to support mobile, it's sad how I can't submit the "interested" form on my N900. Also odd that I need flash when it's plugin-free.

aakour3• 16 years ago

Thanks for letting us know. Will fix the N900 situation ASAP. Flash is for the embedded Youtube video, but I do appreciate the irony as well... -Jiri, Rocket Pack

woodall• 16 years ago

If the user's browser agent is known to support HTML5 use <video>, else use <flash>.

cmelbye2• 16 years ago

Ah, a feature chart... The source to Unity3D is available, and it also has a very comprehensive iPhone deployment option. Apps made with Unity3D are still being approved. Unity also released version 2.1 a few months ago that added a ton of features for MMO games: http://unity3d.com/unity/whats-new/unity-2.1.html

nailer3• 16 years ago

Unity 3d is plugin based. It uses Silverlight or Moonlight or it's own plugin if they're installed and working. This doesn't have that dependency.

OTOH, I suspect Unity3D's performance is much better, as most browsers don't have GPU accelerated graphics yet.

cmelbye2• 16 years ago

I'm not saying that Unity3D is necessarily better, I'm just saying that their feature chart is fairly inaccurate.

Tommigun• 16 years ago

Hi there. I'm Tommi from Rocket Pack and I thought I'd chime in here with a reply.

Yes, games made with Unity are currently still accepted into the App Store but fact is that Unity does stand in violation with the TOS, and the plug COULD be pulled at any moment. If you, as an app developer/company, are ok with that risk then go right ahead! We clearly state that the status is uncertain, not that games are not currently accepted.

About the MMO features in Unity - we are talking about server side things in the chart (should probably clarify that). Right now Unity only offers RPC calls between clients via P2P without a centralised server, which means you'd need to develop a backend for running an MMO. You would also not be able to run the same code on the server (and possibly not even the same language). So needless to say that a LOT of extra work would be needed in order to even start an MMO project with in Unity. Also the requirement of a plugin (if the game is a browser title) would severely hamper potential user base. I'd say that the comparison is definitely fair as we offer both RPCs, parameter reflection and have an entire backend solution that is specifically designed to run the server side of your game with minimal effort. It also offers analytics, social identity handling, leaderboards and a lot of other services out of the box.

Don't get me wrong, I love Unity but its areas of utilization are kinda different from Rocket Engine's. We excel at browser games, MMOs and handheld web apps, whereas Unity is much more geared towards traditional 3d gaming.

Nevertheless, thanks for the feedback, and I'm glad to see such an active discussion here! :)

-Tommi Kiviniemi, Rocket Pack

jasonkester3• 16 years ago

It's not a product. It's a landing page.

Could we stop voting stuff like this onto the front page? I'm sure it'll be cool when they actually build it, but right now it's just an hour's worth of brainstorming and 20 minutes of somebody's time in photoshop. There's absolutely nothing to see, so it's not of any value to us now.

I know that everybody considers this as a Minimum Viable Product, and that you're supposed to launch something like this for every idea you have. That's cool. And I know you're supposed to get as much exposure to it as you can.

But please please please, don't spam up HackerNews with stuff like this. I want to think we're better than that.

Can we make a policy of only submitting things that exist?

catshirt• 16 years ago

there is a 3 minute demo of the product on the front page. perhaps they put it up after your reply. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPVhPGOLe7c

jasonkester3• 16 years ago

Right. There's also screenshots, bulleted lists, and a feature chart.

There's no product though. There's nothing to download, nothing to sign up for, no way to actually get the thing and try it out.

Hopefully one day they'll get the product to the point where we can try it out and have a meaningful discussion about it. Until then, there's no reason for it to be here.

nailer3• 16 years ago

We have discussed many app on HN before they've been released, including the Atlas, the iPhone, and more.

A product not yet ready to be released clearly does not equate to that product not existing.

Nor does being angry entitle you to infer someone else is somehow lying when they say the app being demonstrated exists.

gte910h• 16 years ago

Displaying a landing page with some photo-shopped images "demonstrating" things is a very prolific "idea testing" technique.

While this appears to be a false positive brought on by their lack of a download page, I do not think the person you're replying to was out of line for thinking that's what this is.

aakour3• 16 years ago

Hi Jason, I'm the head of development at Rocket Pack.

The reason we did the video and the website is because the product exists, and we're now at the point where we'd like to get a few pilot projects with other game development companies going.

We've been working hard on this for half a year now. If you can accomplish the same in 20 minutes with Photoshop, more power to you.

jasonkester3• 16 years ago

By all means, put something out that we can play with then. I can't come up with any reason why you'd lock this away behind a landing page if it's even at alpha quality.

Let it out to the world. People will use it. People will tell you what you need to do before you can release it as a product. It's amazing how much good feedback you can get just by letting people try your thing out.

You're doing yourself a disservice by disguising your thing as vaporware if it actually exists.

Keyframe• 16 years ago

I'd be happy to see a good canvas JS gamedev middleware. Only one I kind of like, that I've seen, is Akihabara. Do you guys know more libraries worth looking at?

JimmyH• 16 years ago

I wonder how they're going to handle sound effects and background music without any plugins?

swanson3• 16 years ago

It seems the Aves Engine is more powerful at this point. At least the Video of the dextrose guys shows a lot more stuff going on and it runs much smoother on ipad from the video. Anyways, both seem to be commercial only products.

aakour3• 16 years ago

FYI, we updated http://rocketpack.fi/engine/ to use YouTube's HTML5 embed code, which will hopefully make it easier for everyone to see the introduction video.

Rocket Engine - plugin-free browser game development

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