Mozilla's BrowserQuest - Massively Multiplayer HTML5 Experiment

http://browserquest.mozilla.org/

by guigui • 14 years ago

468 106 14 years ago

browserquest.mozilla.org

riffraff• 14 years ago

NPC soldiers with HTML5 orange shield are just too cute :)

And this is actually a nice little game. Buy then again, where is browserid and open badges support ?

overshard2• 14 years ago

I have browserID supported on a few projects I've shipped, adoption comes down to the developers, all Mozilla can do is provide the tools.

aptwebapps2• 14 years ago

Yes, but this is a Mozilla project, so no excuses on that one.

paulrouget3• 14 years ago

There's no authentication here. I don't see why you would use BrowserID.

groovecoder3• 14 years ago

I could see using BrowserID for auth to save some kind of leaderboard on the server-side or something.

overshard2• 14 years ago

Could not move while on Chrome... was nifty though, I applaud the effort put into this. One day Flash, one day...

jarito• 14 years ago

I'm on Chrome and it worked fine. Took a while to connect to the server, but other than that, it works great.

Jakegissing• 14 years ago

I could move on Chrome by clicking where I wanted to walk

StuffMaster• 14 years ago

Apparently you have to run full screen. I sure hope they fix that.

paulrouget3• 14 years ago

Article about how the game works: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/03/browserquest/

tkahn63• 14 years ago

Since they used localStorage, you can modify the state of your character.

If you want the best weapons in the game, the sword is called 'goldensword' and the armor is call 'goldenarmor'.

eridius3• 14 years ago

What would be the point of that? The only fun in the game (besides the fact that it works at all) is finding the new gear and getting the achievements. If you just edit your character, then you may as well not even play.

ynniv3• 14 years ago

You can also make yourself permanently invincible, attack 10 times per second, and teleport around, if you get a reference to some of the internal variables. I actually found it quite difficult to get that reference since the project uses requireJS and doesn't leave any global/window references. As far as I can tell, the only way is to pause in the debugger, which is much more tamper resistant than I expected it to be.

terhechte• 14 years ago

I played it for 20min and after that I had golden sword and golden armor; hacking around in localStorage would probably have cost me around 10min too. And playing the game deems me much more fun :)

ecto• 14 years ago

This is so awesome. Well done Mozillians!

sbarre• 14 years ago

Very fun and well done. Nice of them to publish the source as well..

lloeki• 14 years ago

It feels very polished indeed. It works just fine on Safari, SFX included, although there's no music (dunno if it is supposed to have). A little musical theme per area would be nice.

There are easter eggs all over the place. I don't want to spoil them but a bunch of them really made me smile.

vibrunazo2• 14 years ago

There is music, it can listen to it on Chrome.

franck4• 14 years ago

You can follow the player population in real-time on this dashboard: http://browserquest.mozilla.org/status/

andypants• 14 years ago

Can anybody explain what the dashboard is showing?

clone1018• 14 years ago

3 servers, 10 worlds per server, number is people.

xtian• 14 years ago

https://github.com/mozilla/BrowserQuest/blob/master/server

It's weird to me that they list the node dependencies in the server README instead of using a package.json.

Very cool project, though.

fooooobar• 14 years ago

Can't even get past the enter your name screen.

jiganti• 14 years ago

I got past that and into the game but I can't get my character to move, tried on Chrome and Safari.

brico• 14 years ago

It's still a long way to compete with Flash in the area of games but it's nice to see this effort.

When I talked to Flash developers, their main concerns were having to worry about different browsers and their belief that everything became "open source" automatically because you can just view the source. They don't want to spend weeks on a project that sets them apart from other competitors only to be copied by the next guy within a day.

naeem• 14 years ago

Shouldn't the beauty of games be the gameplay and the art, not the technology? Isn't it a good thing that the technology behind a game is no longer the primary selling point?

giulianob• 14 years ago

It'll be nice when the tech doesn't matter but if someone can't play your game because they prefer a different browser then that kind of sucks.

icefox• 14 years ago

The technology behind a game is nearly always the primary selling point. There are too many games so users need some way to differentiate them. Seeing that game X uses tech Y means that people will talk about it and play it just to see tech Y. Even if it isn't very good people _will_ talk about which means it gets sales.

groovecoder3• 14 years ago

That's an interesting argument against HTML5 apps. If I really want to copy your Flash app, I'll just start at https://www.google.com/search?q=flash+decompilers

tibbon• 14 years ago

I dunno, this is better (and more fun) than any Flash based browser MMO I've played. Also didn't bug me about buying coins in their store or some Zynga-like upsell.

newobj• 14 years ago

Crashes Mobile Safari on my iPhone.

masklinn2• 14 years ago

No issue on iOS 5.1 here (on a 4S)

itmag2• 14 years ago

Would be pretty cool if someone implemented a decent browser-based MMORPG with a high degree of scriptability. Get the best of MMORPGs and MUDs + portability.

brudgers• 14 years ago

The other day, I was thinking about an SMS based MUD for cheap feature phones - text based of course. An online game for places without much 3G adoption but where there are lots of Nokias, so to speak.

GFischer• 14 years ago

Hmm... that could get too expensive fast. You have to find a place where unlimited texting packages are standard :)

daeken• 14 years ago

I had an idea for a universal MUD a long while back (probably in junior high school, when I was a huge MUD nerd). A single game world with interfaces for IM, SMS, and the web. No matter where you were or what interfaces you had available, you could continue to be immersed in the world. I got the communication code working well for IM and the web, but never went beyond that; with Twilio, it'd probably be pretty straightforward...

itmag2• 14 years ago

Sounds interesting. Wanna email me? :)

aw3c22• 14 years ago

works with opera but eats a whole cpu core

gcb3• 14 years ago

which version? the non-preview 11 didn't worked.

aw3c22• 14 years ago

Version 11.61, Build 1250, Platform Linux

kenrikm• 14 years ago

I like how they made it really easy to get in. No signup just name your guy and go. I generally don't have time to play games however I appreciate the amount of work that goes into them. Good Job.

masklinn2• 14 years ago

Realm of the Mad God is even better on that front: it auto-generate a name for you, you just hit "Play" and you're in the game ready to rock (you can edit the game once you're hooked of course, and create a formal account, and start paying your dealer, but the initial experience is "hit play and you're playing")

gcb3• 14 years ago

best "tutorial" i've seen indeed.

digisth• 14 years ago

Clever, and very well done.

glenntzke• 14 years ago

I'd like to see see gain some traction and give Runescape a run for it's popularity.

jiggy20112• 14 years ago

Anyone know how they do the networking?

Websock , Comet or ajax?

jiggy20112• 14 years ago

Ah, It's websocket with load balanced nodejs servers.

abraham• 14 years ago

There are active websocket connections.

justinhj• 14 years ago

It's not a Comet style poll because the only requests I see it making are to a server that seem to be tracking metrics that have no response.

paulrouget3• 14 years ago

All the info are here: http://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/03/browserquest/

user24592• 14 years ago

Really organized, easy reading source too: https://github.com/mozilla/BrowserQuest

Outstanding work that I'm sure is going to inspire a lot of people. Though I don't see a license file anywhere.

franck4• 14 years ago

Thanks. We are going to update the repository soon with licensing info.

user24592• 14 years ago

Awesome! And again great work. The game was really enjoyable and the code inspiring.

vibrunazo2• 14 years ago

Btw, there's an OctoCat NPC in game that tells you the github url :)

pavel_lishin• 14 years ago

One annoying thing is that I don't see any sort of guide on how to create map files.

LeafStorm• 14 years ago

Presumably they have a tool for doing so. (At least, I hope they do...writing all of that data by hand looks like a Herculean task.) Hopefully they will release that as well.

swapsmagic• 14 years ago

Why github is not showing json files correctly? https://github.com/mozilla/BrowserQuest/blob/master/client/s...

I can see only "{", to view the full i need to go to Raw format. I think Github should provide support for formatted json.

1qaz2wsx3edc• 14 years ago

seems like a new github bug

charlesju• 14 years ago

What is the license on this?

franck4• 14 years ago

We will update the licensing info in the GitHub repo in the coming days.

pepijndevos2• 14 years ago

Did anyone figure out how to get to the mario pipe, and what the ??? quest is?

TobbenTM• 14 years ago

First ??? quest: Get an orange potion (to get the Firefox costume)

Second ??? quest: Enter a portal. I found one to the east-southeast to the starting point.

Still trying to figure out the last one.

mthq• 14 years ago

The last one is Rickroll'd, you meet Rick Astley in one of the caves.

Flenser• 14 years ago

It's in the cave above the cat.

yamilg• 14 years ago

I did both but didn't get any additional achievement, what am I doing wrong?

dalore• 14 years ago

Wow this is pretty cool. But flash could do this years ago :)

esente• 14 years ago

Yes, but flash will not be here years from now. Just move on.

soapdog• 14 years ago

Just collected the 20 achivements. Really fun demo, inspired me to learn more about pixel art. I can code well but my art skills are bad. Wish they expanded it...

cyborg• 14 years ago

I forked this https://github.com/mkrecny/BrowserQuest - added a static file server on branch static and dependency management via package.json. Main annoyance now is that they don't include the audio assets in the github repo : / Great fun game though.

michaelmartin• 14 years ago

Brilliant game, the little Easter Eggs really made it worth playing.

For anyone wondering about the 2 mystery achievements at the end; the clues are in client/js/game.js ( https://github.com/mozilla/BrowserQuest/blob/master/client/j... ), line 278.

Hiding the clues in the code like that just adds to the coolness. Great touch!

flexterra• 14 years ago

Awesome! Thanks for the productivity kill mozilla. Looks great and it's a lot of fun. Now I want to learn how to do this stuff in the browser.

weixiyen• 14 years ago

The mouse movement is laggy. Why not use hardware mouse speeds? For an interaction with that much frequency, it makes the game unplayable.

nitinmartolia2• 14 years ago

19/20 ... what is the unknown ????? 20th one...anyone able to find?

PhearTheCeal5• 14 years ago

1. Go into forest 2. There is a maze cave in the top right corner of forest. 3. Get stuck in the maze ;) 4. To find final award just go through a cave door then go back into the door you came out of. 5. Yes, caves are magic

nitinmartolia2• 14 years ago

thanks !! it worked..

sesqu• 14 years ago

I found a bug.

I had my guy move to the other side of a barrier, and he did so by taking a path through the adjacent square - but then my view was in the adjacent square, my guy moved offscreen, never to return.

For such a slick demo, that was really unexpected.

Jyaif• 14 years ago

HTML5, the futur of gaming! Meanwhile, World of Warcraft uses less CPU/GPU than this demo...

rmc• 14 years ago

I can't wait until browsers have inbuilt peer-to-peer networking. Then we could do something like this entirely client side

theunixbeard• 14 years ago

Am I doing something really stupid, or is this not working anymore???

Mozilla's BrowserQuest - Massively Multiplayer HTML5 Experiment

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