Plink, a multiplayer HTML5 music game

http://labs.dinahmoe.com/plink

by skimbrel • 15 years ago

329 74 15 years ago

labs.dinahmoe.com

dekz• 15 years ago

This is incredibly fun. When others joined and started making music together it immediately brought a smile to my face.

The greatest part about is the music created isn't terrible.

kgen• 15 years ago

Second this comment, the real time feedback that you get and the realization that you aren't making something that doesn't completely sound like crap makes this surprisingly more fun than I thought it would be.

larelli• 15 years ago

To me it sounds as if the reason for the music not sounding like total crap is, that the author uses pentatonic scales, which are also used in improvisations. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentatonic_scale)

Goladus• 15 years ago

I agree, I noticed that almost immediately. Also, the rhythms are quantized and the tempo is fixed.

It's still a very cool demo, though.

kevingadd• 15 years ago

Is the Web Audio API actually part of HTML5? It looks like it's still just a proposal that only works in Chrome. :(

Very cool demo though. Feels smooth.

starwed• 15 years ago

I think it's just a chrome proposal right now.

Firefox also has an implemented proposal. Not sure if one or the other has any particular advantages?

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Audio_Data_API

overshard• 15 years ago

This is amazing. Even with a bunch of random people doing random things the music still sounds great!

LukeFitz• 15 years ago

Am I the only person this isn't working for right now? It loads, I enter a username and then it tells me I've been idle too long. I guess the servers may be overloaded due to HN?

sepent3• 15 years ago

I have the same problem...

kentnguyen• 15 years ago

How do you solve this?

sepent3• 15 years ago

I used a proxy server in US and it works now.

tricolon• 15 years ago

I could play this forever.

giberson2• 15 years ago

Love it. Needs one feature pronto. Channel mode, so me and my friends can jam out together in a private room.

illdave• 15 years ago

Really really impressive - surprisingly fun.

Raphael• 15 years ago

It felt out of sync. I could move up and down, and clicking made the circles solid, and there were some other players, and some sounds. I suppose moving up and down and clicking changes the sound, but I'm not sure how.

icandoitbetter• 15 years ago

This is amazing, and not only as a demo of the API. I was waiting for a uniform raw audio standard to be implemented by all browsers, but after this I'm motivated to start playing around now. There are so many interesting possibilities for musical improvisation interfaces.

zantzinger2• 15 years ago

I wonder whether, if there were all 12 tones on the Western 12-tone scale, it be more cacophonous. Somehow, with two octaves of only white notes, as it were, and the tendency of users to move about constantly (because it looks pretty and you get the exciting perceptual feedback of changing the sounds), most of it doesn't sound bad. Great idea.

gb• 15 years ago

Pretty sure this the pentatonic scale actually - so all black notes. It almost certainly woule be more cacophonous even if it was just all white notes, never mind the full scale.

superkinz2• 15 years ago

I love it. I'm musically challenged but feel like I can actually make reasonably not-horrible music. And it's like a video game. Love it!

DillonF• 15 years ago

Very cool. This reminds me a lot of playing around on a korg kaossilator, a very nifty toy with an xy pad where you can pick a scale, bpm and an "instrument" and jam away without worrying about hitting wrong notes.

peterhajas• 15 years ago

Just played this for 5 minutes. Absolutely fantastic! I had a riot, and seemed to play some music with other people. Really cool!

balac• 15 years ago

This is surprisingly addictive and the music actually sounds cool too. It would be nice to hit notes without sliding though.

carterdea• 15 years ago

Super fun. I'd like to see some keyboard suport, like up and down arrow keys and space bar to play a note.

zantzinger2• 15 years ago

And maybe keyboard support for 'notes' - every letter on the keyboard assigned to ABCDEFG and the black notes in between. Then you could, say, plug in a written text and see what happens.

9999• 15 years ago

"Oops! Your browser doesn't support Web Audio."

Meanwhile, Adobe just announced that the Unreal Engine runs in Flash Player 11. That's AAA quality 3d gaming in the browser (and not just Chrome). I am so bored with "HTML 5" game (that aren't even HTML 5 official spec) announcements getting such a ridiculous amount of play.

Imagine if someone went out to E3 in 2011 and announced that they just came up with this crazy TV game concept called Pong, but it only works on Magnavox TVs. Absolutely no one would care.

tete2• 15 years ago

The Quake Engine has been running inside browsers for ages.

Also if you speak about portability. Flash really isn't very portable when you compare it with the platforms supported by Webkit. Flash has always been a huge mess when it comes to this. Webkit and Gecko are pretty much up to date, but many people hardcode browser checks instead of just asking whether the browser supports certain stuff. I think that's the biggest problem - well, besides the market share of outdated IE versions of course.

zobzu2• 15 years ago

What portability. I mean, Web Audio API is supported by only Chrome and Safari (so that's not "webkit". Sure Flash ain't better. But hey! None of this is standardized.

And why should Gecko support Web Audio API? You see, they got Web Audio Data instead. Not compatible of course. None are standard.

So flash does beat them and HTML5 on that very topic.

dbattaglia2• 15 years ago

in the main JS file, you can see an error thrown creating the main audio-context object triggers that message:

  audioContext = new webkitAudioContext();

IIRC, Firefox has their own mozXxx versions of these audio APIs. I guess both will be updated to standard names (ex: AudioContext) once everyone is on board.

ugh• 15 years ago

Meh. As if that matters. It’s not really a common use case and I don’t see it becoming one. Flash will die and then rot in its niche.

nkassis• 15 years ago

Is the adobe demo playable by the public? I was under the impression that they showed a video but I can't find a way to actually try it.

Until then Adobe still has to fix all the issues that the browser vendors are working on. We will have to see but I'm going to wait until it's released and usable, right now it's just a tech demo.

In fact, just yesterday someone had code up to display TF2 levels and he also built a demo capable of displaying the Rage IOS levels in WebGL a few months ago. So there your example of AAA games.

forkrulassail• 15 years ago

Unfortunately doesn't allow my Chromium-browser

tete2• 15 years ago

Same for my Firefox Aurora, even though I think it supports the Web Audio API (not sure, though if it's really up to date).

melling• 15 years ago

I run the Firefox Nightly and it doesn't support Web Audio either. Shouldn't that be happening soon?

sepent3• 15 years ago

Doesn't work in Chromium 13, but works in Chromium 14.

zerostar072• 15 years ago

I am hooked! Who was i playing with? Need keyboard shortcuts. Sometimes there are too many guys playing (sorry guys, some of you suck :P), have separate rooms.

rshm• 15 years ago

Instant addiction.

dn11• 15 years ago

Pretty cool. A time-quantised version would probably have the potential to sound better though, as the latency makes it difficult to get any kind of rhythm going in this version.

hamidnazari• 15 years ago

This is really nice. Well done. It'd be great if you could create your own private games and invite your friends over.

utunga• 15 years ago

seriously the coolest thing ive seen in ages - had a really great time jamming out with a bunch of strangers just like that ... awesome effort

danparsonson• 15 years ago

Came here to say exactly that; so much fun :-)

shocks2• 15 years ago

Hey, I'm a pianist and I have a few ideas you might consider.

1. Let me pick the colour with the numbers 1-9. 2. Let me play notes with the keyboard. (I'm not sure the best way to assign the keys, but I'm sure you can come up with something). 3. Let me play chords.

That would be awesome. Great work so far!

zerostar072• 15 years ago

Sounds like you are asking for the ultimate band-roulette :)

shocks2• 15 years ago

Well now that you mention it... Haha! :) Actually I was thinking, and perhaps adding to many features would make it harder to be musical without any previous experience.

mitjak• 15 years ago

I can't stress #2 enough: it's extremely difficult to do any complex playing without keyboard mapping. Try doing a disco hihat, a tom roll, or a repeating bassline pattern.

nolok• 15 years ago

This is the kind of things I could lose days to. Well done.

jamesrom• 15 years ago

Whoa. That was heaps of fun!

Inversechi• 15 years ago

This is awesome :)

damncabbage• 15 years ago

Wow, this is amazing.

I completely ignored HTML5 audio after a couple of abortive attempts at using it to make something for an iPhone web toy, but seems to show it's not quite as terrible anymore.

jmettes• 15 years ago

I think it's really clever how the game makes it very difficult to NOT sound good! The timing of the notes seems to snap to the tempo exactly (e.g., there's a delay when you hit a note too early) and the limited scale of notes all sound good together.

I've played a few HTML5/Flash music games lately, and all of them give enough flexibility with sounds to easily become messy when played with multiple players (especially with trolls!). This game makes the player feel like they're good at music. Great work!

aab1d• 15 years ago

+1 creating a game that involves collaborating with strangers and creating music could be tedious. This overcomes that handicap pretty well. I love the concept, great work!

c16• 15 years ago

Seriously good fun! Wasted too much of my time today playing on it when I should have been working. Thanks :-)

pedrocarvalho• 15 years ago

Wow, really cool. Great fun

arc_of_descent• 15 years ago

Very nice. It took me a moment to realize there were other users who were creating sound too!

dts• 15 years ago

Fantastic! Great use of web sockets and though there was some obvious latency (unavoidable) it did not at all deter from having a great time. I love that all the sounds in the set work together well and you could take this in a million directions.

noduerme2• 15 years ago

While it's very cool, it's worth pointing out that the idea is derivative of a Unity-based game called "Planck" (as in Max, size, etc) that's been in development for quite awhile. See: http://www.shadegrowngames.com/

It's hard to believe the authors of Plink aren't aware of Planck...

adam-a• 15 years ago

Whilst Planck looks very cool (extremely cool), it is a bit of a stretch to say that Plink is a rip off of it. They both have generated music in them, but I can't see much similarity beyond that.

noduerme2• 15 years ago

I didn't mean to say it's a rip off. It's different enough, and plus it's cool. I'm just speculating that the Plink coders must know about it. I got to play with the Planck alpha, and Plink "feels" similar in certain ways. The way the notes are displayed as ripples, the way motion across the play area triggers notes on a scale with different instruments (which in Planck are "weapons"), and the way the notes are quantized. In Planck, the notes/loops happen when you hit something you're shooting at, but the point isn't so much to hit things as it is to create rhythmic loops between the gameplay and the music you're generating. It makes some interesting compromises to keep the music on tempo and still give the sense of hitting the targets instantly. Really, I just wanted to know if the Plink guys had heard of it.

dbattaglia2• 15 years ago

Very nice!

Funny, I've been spending this last week (off from work) working on an Audio API/Node.js multi-user drum machine. So it's very cool for me to see another similar idea pop up at this point. As a long-time software synth/VST/music guy, I can't wait for the browsers to catch up on audio as fast as they are visual APIs.

paraschopra• 15 years ago

This is seriously fun. LOVED it! Thanks for making it

tristanperry• 15 years ago

Pretty awesome! I just played for a couple of minutes (well, that was the original aim - it turned into 6-7 minutes all-too-quickly!)

paul92902• 15 years ago

I enjoyed creating a song with it (lyrics/melody), but I didnt understand the gaming mechanics.

paul92902• 15 years ago

Interesting one of your clients created a drunk alarm clock app itunes.apple.com/se/app/fyllekameran/ . Not sure how it works? Do you you record a video when your drunk and that's what wakes you or is it your friend's creating drunk wake up greetings that are your alarm sound?

superkinz2• 15 years ago

This needs to be an iPad app ASAP. When can we get it?

apitaru• 15 years ago

Having been through the Director, Flash and now HTML5 fads, I dream of a day when this title would suffice on HN:

"Plink, a multiplayer music game"

This is just to say - I enjoyed Plink very much and would have just the same regardless of the technology.

mcferrin• 15 years ago

Love it!!!

jQueryIsAwesome• 15 years ago

There is a photo of the guys of dinahmoe next to the definition of awesome. Seriously, and i just had an overflow of ideas about online music creation.

city41• 15 years ago

This is so great, that I really hope it catches on so I can go and jam out with others whenever I want. I spread this site as far as my little network will go. Awesome job!

thepumpkin1979• 15 years ago

Awesome... is Google Chrome the only browser with this API level?

mahcode• 15 years ago

Addictingly amazing!! Is there I way to record my jam session?

giberson2• 15 years ago

I've wanted to dabble in a few audio experiments myself, however I keep coming up short trying to find single sample tones for all the notes on a scale. Not sure exactly what to search for. Any tips for good source material?

kunley• 15 years ago

I was delighted to see how people automagically give others a chance to try other instruments and switch with some kind of intuition.

Also the most pleasure gave me an idea of playing a bass for a while and watching others improvise.

Plink, a multiplayer HTML5 music game

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