Show HN: Powderkeg, a realtime, synchronous, multiplayer HTML5 action game

http://powderkeg.artillery.com/

by statico • 14 years ago

153 71 14 years ago

powderkeg.artillery.com

statico17• 14 years ago

If the game doesn't load in Chrome, try using an incognito window since you're probably a Ghostery user. (Sorry, I swear I had fixed that...)

richtaur• 14 years ago

Congrats you guys :-)

SeanDav• 14 years ago

Very cute little game. Quite laggy for me. I used Chrome. Also please add Computer players at some point.

Liongadev• 14 years ago

Extremly lagging. Let me guess, Node.js?

statico17• 14 years ago

TCP.

If you mouseover the tiny, hard-to-see lag meter in your colored square while playing a game you'll be able to see some stats about your connection.

kzahel4• 14 years ago

I love this game. It is a themed copy of Hudson Soft's Bomberman game that I originally played on the SNES.

The creators have a blog entry about latency and websockets. With even a minimal amount of packetloss, TCP makes for really bad latency - http://blog.artillery.com/2012/06/websocket-performance.html

It's too bad we won't see any playable twitch games in the browser until there is some way to do UDP. I don't see why browsers don't just allow UDP subject to same origin policy, perhaps only on pages which serve a special "X-Allow-UDP" header.

From what I understand, the only reason browsers shy away from being able to send UDP packets is fear of DDOS. This does not seem to be an issue if packets are only sent to same host that the page is served from.

rlp• 14 years ago

I didn't have any lag. That was fun, kind of like Bomberman. Nice job!

lrem• 14 years ago

Would you consider adding on screen controls for tablet users? I'd guess this kind of thing is a better fit for mobile than desktop, but is unusable as is under Android Chrome.

hayksaakian• 14 years ago

Runs like ass on my nexus 7 and galaxy nexus

fourmii• 14 years ago

I just went on and played against someone called G...Maybe from HN? Anyway, fun game, pretty slick. I'm loving the stuff people are doing with HTML5. Well done!

Ohadr• 14 years ago

Great game, well done! Expecting inevitable new features - Facebook integration, leaderboards, powerups, chat, AI....

Good luck

n-gauge• 14 years ago

Looks great! would you be supporting full screen support for 1366 x 768 (with no scrollbars)?

nulluk• 14 years ago

Really well done & polished. Had a few moments where the lag made it unbearable but besides that it works as expected.

spindritf• 14 years ago

It gets laggy sometimes and forgets the name you chose (changes it to a color). Still very cool.

lrm242• 14 years ago

This is a great little game. Just played a few rounds and had a blast but hit some nasty lag a few times. The basic game play is quite addictive. Nice job.

catshirt2• 14 years ago

i have to ask... pun intended? i used the same wording originally, but revised after i realized what i'd said.

witoldc• 14 years ago

That is amazing.

That said, after the first game it was very laggy.

kin• 14 years ago

Bomberman! This is a well done clone. I wish it were a bit smoother. I died because of the lag.

avi_e• 14 years ago

I'm getting these errors in Chrome (v. 22.0.1229.79 m): Unexpected response code: 404 :1 Channel error 'BROWSER_WS_ERROR': 'undefined' __runtime.js:1 Channel 0 closed. __runtime.js:1

statico17• 14 years ago

Thanks for the report! On it...

glenntzke• 14 years ago

All I see is a desert background with nothing happening and "Channel 0 closed." in my js console.

klinquist• 14 years ago

Exact same thing here.

statico17• 14 years ago

Are you behind a firewall or proxy?

statico17• 14 years ago

Thanks for the kind words and helpful feedback everyone! We appreciate it!

If you're still having trouble with Chrome or Firefox, please reply below with your browser and version, and possibly with a gist/pastebin of any console errors. Mark and I will get on it.

Regarding the lag: We match you with players based on your latency to each gameserver and the amount of time you've been waiting. If you experienced a lot of lag earlier, it might have been due to there being too few players online. However, 196 people are playing as I type this now, and hopefully there's now enough player density so you'll get matched with a lower-latency player who's nearby.

You can read more on our blog post: http://blog.artillery.com/2012/10/play-powderkeg-html5-multi...

We're also on VentureBeat today: http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/04/artillery-aims-to-make-web...

Also, I'd like to thank our amazing artist, Adam deGrandis. Check out his portfolio — he's incredible: http://www.adamdegrandis.com/portfolio/

autonoms• 14 years ago

Seems like Ghostery is causing problems on Chrome.

statico17• 14 years ago

Yep. Some of the code assumes the FB global is present, which I thought we had factored out, but apparently didn't.

mrgreenfur• 14 years ago

Sweet game! It's a remake/rip of Bomberman, which is totally awesome because Bomberman is the best game ever.

catshirt2• 14 years ago

wow thank you for this. haven't thought about bomberman in years and within 5 seconds i was having a great time.

lag issues ("waiting for other players") and passer-throughs are making it a bit difficult to get a game going though.

edit: this has a few crippling bugs. seems like i have the most trouble after someone leaves a game. also, this desperately needs chat, or voice chat, and a high score. thanks again this is the most fun i've had in a while.

atroche2• 14 years ago

You might want to consider using client-side prediction and lag compensation.

Here's John Carmack describing how he used the aforementioned techniques to make Quake playable over the internet: http://fabiensanglard.net/quakeSource/johnc-log.aug.htm

Here's how Valve do it:

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Latency_Compensatin...

And here's another good article on the topic: http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game-programmers/wha...

Oh, and here's one implementing it with Node / HTML5: http://buildnewgames.com/real-time-multiplayer/

Good luck.

statico17• 14 years ago

All good links, thanks! We are in fact using client-side prediction and lag compensation. It's extremely difficult to make a perfectly-playable action game with 500ms ping — you'd be kicked off a Quake server with that kind of lag :)

Powderkeg uses lockstep network synchronization and every client sees the same simulation (though the player you control has prediction). The network framerate is 10 FPS and the server waits 2 ticks to collect input, so anyone with more than a 200ms ping to the gameserver will have a less-than-desirable experience.

atroche2• 14 years ago

Apologies! I just read your blog post, and it seems like you're way ahead of me.

How come you decided to send input rather than state to the client?

TimJRobinson• 14 years ago

So with your lockstep I presume you're allowing the client to move instantly locally then syncing back with the server? As I'm getting some minor snapbacks (I probably have 200ms+ ping being in Australia) and usually lockstep (for RTS games anyway) doesn't have that and has input delay instead as the client waits for their moves to return from the server.

EDIT: Ah cool I see it's explained in your post: http://blog.artillery.com/2012/10/play-powderkeg-html5-multi...

Arelius2• 14 years ago

Is there any way to display ping?

Also perhaps the servers are a bit overloaded? Cause I'm playing from Palo Alto on a decent connection and the lag is making it pretty unplayable.

nopassrecover• 14 years ago

I'm playing from Aus, and yeah there are slight snapbacks but it's completely playable (and quite fun).

Tipzntrix• 14 years ago

Your licenses page (http://powderkeg.artillery.com/attribution.html) is down and otherwise, there's no reference to Bomberman here at all.

It's a well-executed game though. Haven't found any flaws, but I can't really say it's original. Good proof-of-concept for HTML5!

statico17• 14 years ago

Whoops! Fixing that broken link now. Thanks!

arcatek• 14 years ago

Unplayable ("Waiting for other players").

RDeckard• 14 years ago

Nice, just beat someone named DJ.

snizovtsev• 14 years ago

Another online bomberman clone with massive multiplayer from Russians: http://bombermine.ru/

statico17• 14 years ago

I've chatted with Ivan. He's very talented :)

CaioAlonso• 14 years ago

I visited the site using Firefox Nightly and it said: "Powderkeg can't run on your browser. Would you mind coming back with either Google Chrome or Firefox?".

statico17• 14 years ago

You mean, something about the absolute, bleeding-edge version of Firefox causes it not to work? ;)

Kidding aside, I'll take a look. What OS?

flipstewart• 14 years ago

Unplayably laggy over here. I really wanted to like it, but it's so slow.

user24• 14 years ago

I enter my name and then what? Pressing enter does nothing, no other way to proceed. Firefox.

steverb• 14 years ago

Anyway I can invite other players by sending them a link and not use facebook?

statico17• 14 years ago

That's been on my plate for a week, but I simply didn't get around to it. Stay tuned!

DrCatbox• 14 years ago

Ah bomberman! Very cool. The game is a bit laggy for some reason for me, but still cool.

How long did it take to make the graphics/sprites?

statico17• 14 years ago

Adam, our artist, was usually blocked on us, the guys implementing feature code. I believe it he spent around 130 hours from concept to completion.

ritonlajoie• 14 years ago

Looks great but I could not play with my azerty keyboard :p I guess for me you would map:

z : up

s : down

q : left

d : right

statico17• 14 years ago

Arrow keys should work for you, too.

flexxaeon• 14 years ago

Great job. Lagged a but but it's likely my connecttion

zio99• 14 years ago

Dude, that was awesome +1 Wish there were more levels

enraged_camel• 14 years ago

All I see is a desert with a bunch of cacti? Nothing seems to be happening. Chrome Version 22.0.1229.79.

bemmu• 14 years ago

Is it possible to reach as low ping levels with Javascript or Flash as it is with a native app like Quake?

tonetheman• 14 years ago

yup yup good game. very fun. good job.

muhuk• 14 years ago

Chrome user on Debian (Version 21.0.1180.89).

When I load it in a normal window and click "Find a match" nothing happens. In console:

> findMatch failed: CHANNEL_REQUEST_ERROR: 'BROWSER_WS_ERROR: WebSocket.readyState 3 != WebSocket.OPEN'

When I try to load it in an incognito window:

> XMLHttpRequest cannot load http://pk-cdn.prod.artillery.com/powderkeg/21/Scenes/MainMen.... Origin http://powderkeg.artillery.com is not allowed by Access-Control-Allow-Origin.

cmccabe• 14 years ago

The graphics are very nice and felt professional. However, I don't think you're doing enough of the game logic client-side. I saw very noticeable glitches constantly, to the point where the game is unplayable for me. Even if some packets don't get through, you should continue to animate smoothly. Even when walking across the map, my character was glitching out-- moving a step or two, then getting stuck, then teleporting a few spaces forward, then getting stuck again, etc.

One of the starcraft devs posted a blog entry here that should be instructive-- sorry, I lost the link, but it might still be reachable from the front page. Basically, you need to do as much as possible on the client side, even when packets are not going through, to make the interface feel responsive.

The issue might also be exacerbated by a simple lack of bandwidth, or maybe some problem with HTML5 (I admit, I am not that familiar with HTML5 as a dev environment.)

http://bombermine.ru, on the other hand, was as smooth as butter for me. So I don't think the problem is insurmountable. Anyway, don't give up, I'm sure you can fix it! You probably should create some kind of test environment where packets are artificially delayed-- perhaps there is an iptables incantation in Linux that can do it for you.

sabat• 14 years ago

Nice game, no complaints at all. I can see myself wasting a few hours at this. :-)

alyx• 14 years ago

Unfortunately does not work with IE 10

Show HN: Powderkeg, a realtime, synchronous, multiplayer HTML5 action game

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