Dune II ported to the Web with Emscripten

by experiment0 • 14 years ago

185 64 14 years ago

thristian• 14 years ago

I'm sure this site will be taken offline for copyright infringement almost immediately, but it really is a decent recreation of the original. It's also historically significant: Dune II is to the real-time strategy genre what Wolfenstein 3D is to the first-person-shooter: not necessary the very first example ever, but the first to achieve notable popularity, and the progenitor of most of the following examples.

iconfinder• 14 years ago

And thank god for the original C&C. I still think the soundtrack was brilliant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZAaq5JIhW0

pschorf• 14 years ago

I was always partial to Red Alert: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb-gI_pFog0

silon3• 14 years ago

For me, it's also the predecessor to tower defense games.

ygra• 14 years ago

This took a moment to sink in but that's quite exactly how I played it (and Dune 2000) back in the day. Way before I even knew Tower Defense games :-)

avolcano• 14 years ago

No copyright issues; it's based off of OpenDUNE: http://www.opendune.org/

Yuioup• 14 years ago

The source-code is probably based off OpenDUNE but I'm pretty sure the art isn't. They'll be taken down for the art for sure ...

jcl• 14 years ago

As far as I can tell from their wiki, OpenDUNE was created by disassembling the original game and recoding the assembly in C. I wouldn't say the copyright issue is clear-cut, here.

tapertaper• 14 years ago

Maybe a silly question: do copyrights for games (art or whatever) ever expire?

tptacek2• 14 years ago

Yes, but not for a long time.

stonemetal• 14 years ago

I believe this would be the correct copyright term for a game made by a game company.(every body who made it works for the game company so it should all fall under work for hire). Instead of the usual death + 70.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright_...

95 years from publication or 120 years from creation whichever is shorter (anonymous works, pseudonymous works, or works made for hire, published since 1978)

astrodust3• 14 years ago

Same as for anything. In the United States there's a chart for looking up rights and determining if a property has reverted to the public domain: http://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm

1923 is the base-line year for any works with a proper copyright notice. 1977 for any works at all, as the requirement for a notice or registration was eliminated.

PostOnce• 14 years ago

Emscripten is fantastic. https://github.com/kripken/emscripten

LLVM -> JavaScript. The possibilities are many, wish I had more time to play with this kind of stuff.

I believe it's how http://repl.it and similar sites work.

Tangentially, aside from porting games, http://luatut.com/crash_course.html is one of the better uses [of Emscripten] I've seen. Press Escape and a console drops down. Handy way to learn a language.

zodiac• 14 years ago

repl.it uses biwascheme, a scheme interpreter written in javascript

dbaupp• 14 years ago

They also use Empythoned (CPython compiled with Emscripten, https://github.com/replit/empythoned) and Emscripted-Ruby (Ruby compiled with Emscripten, https://github.com/replit/emscripted-ruby) and a version of Lua compiled with Emscripted (https://github.com/replit/jsrepl/tree/master/extern/lua), among others.

ambrop72• 14 years ago

See my port of my little scripting language (NCD) to Emscripten: http://badvpn.googlecode.com/svn/wiki/emncd.html

ambrop72• 14 years ago

OpenTTD in Emscripten is particularly impressive: http://play-ttd.com/

yread• 14 years ago

it seems to have some bugs. I lost a unit in the first level (I know, I know) and tile graphics went bonkers

buster• 14 years ago

Just awesome. Dune II was a big part of my childhood. :)

Tharkun• 14 years ago

Same here. I spent countless hours playing this in 1992, back when I was tiny and my English skillz were severely lacking. Words like "siege tank" were beyond me, so the siege tank was nicknamed after my fat aunt, the MVC after my handy uncle etc.

Brings back memories.

spiritplumber• 14 years ago

Haha, us too. It got to where me and my friends who played it would call someone a harvester if they kept getting lost IRL due to their stupidity

verdverm• 14 years ago

i recall it took 8 floppies to install or something like that, i remember coming across the base plans my older neighbor had made. totallychanged they way i played

shabble2• 14 years ago

These being my introduction to the Dune universe, I was quite surprised when I finally read the books to not come across a single mention of the House Ordos :)

janlukacs• 14 years ago

+1 i spent many nights with this. Sonic Tank FTW!

jasonkester• 14 years ago

Awesome. I'm not so excited about the tiny 320x200 viewport though. Why not zoom it to fit the browser window?

Strangely, they seem to have managed to disable the browser's built-in zooming.

So yeah, fun, but squinty.

ghshephard• 14 years ago

If you are on an OS X system, just use Ctrl+touchpad two-finger scroll to zoom in/out (presuming you've enabled that)

jQueryIsAwesome• 14 years ago

Sometimes browser zooming breaks pixel calculations... yeah, one more edge case to the already long list of edge cases.

azakai• 14 years ago

> Strangely, they seem to have managed to disable the browser's built-in zooming.

I believe it captures all keyboard input. But if you click the URL bar, you should then be able to zoom in and out (since then the page doesn't get key events).

gus_massa• 14 years ago

I played this game a lot a few years ago :).

It amazing/annoying how different the UI is from the modern games. For example to move a unit you must click the "move" button and the click the place where you want to go. There are a million of details that make modern games easier to play.

SeppoErviala3• 14 years ago

In the DOS version you could also use 'm' on the keyboard

hiddenfeatures2• 14 years ago

Also possible in the online version

hiddenfeatures2• 14 years ago

Oh man... yeah. Seems like I am going to waste a few hours this weekend on this game :-)

lnanek2• 14 years ago

Haha, yeah, I noticed that immediately because I tried to "micro" like in Starcraft. Cycling units being attacked out of battles and units attacking in, etc.. Not sure if I had the same concepts back when I played it as a kid, heh.

danvideo• 14 years ago

Anyone else having trouble getting it running? I'm on a very fast internet connection and it's been 2-3 minutes of black screen already.

SeanDav• 14 years ago

Doesn't run on Firefox for me, but does on Chrome. (Man I hate saying that as I am a Firefox fanboy)

mercurial• 14 years ago

Works with Firefox 16.0.2, unfortunately on Windows.

epidemian• 14 years ago

It took quite a while to load, but it worked fine on Firefox for me.

SeppoErviala3• 14 years ago

No sound effects :(

axusgrad• 14 years ago

The music brings back memories, though :)

SeppoErviala3• 14 years ago

We've come a long way: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/9414611/dune-II.jpg

timtadh• 14 years ago

The download is pretty massive, it is 6235641 bytes. Which is slow even on the multihomed fiber connection I am on. Still pretty neat.

hatu• 14 years ago

That's only 6MB, I think the server is just getting hit pretty bad from all the traffic

myth_drannon• 14 years ago

small bug : you can attack and kill your own units :)

debacle• 14 years ago

That's not a bug.

cskau• 14 years ago

For anyone interested in playing Dune II natively I highly recommend Dune Legacy[0] - an open source implementation which I personally found much better than OpenDUNE, which the link is based on.

[0] http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/dunelegacy/index.php?t...

buddycasino• 14 years ago

Nice! It fixes most annoyances of the original Dune II, e.g. you can use your right mouse button to order units to move somewhere, and there is finally a production queue.

IgorPartola• 14 years ago

Funny, I've been replaying Dune 2 over the past week and a half. Despite the controls being somewhat clunky (no selecting multiple units, your units won't defend themselves in a lot of cases, etc.) this game has character and charm, not to mention hours and hours of gameplay. I have been hoping that games like this, King's Bounty, Settlers, XCom, and others from that era would show up for mobile platforms. A lot of them would work really well on a touchscreen device.

rsynnott• 14 years ago

There's a decent Settlers (Settlers 3-ish) port for the iPad.

xyzzyb• 14 years ago

iDos is great for this. Playing Ultima V on my iPad is fantastic.

jweir• 14 years ago

Oh wow, this takes me back.

My first job was at Virgin Games as an artist. I got a beta version of Dune II, and played it obsessively.

The artwork Westwood Studios created was very inspiring - their artists were very good and developed some wonder palettes.

Nordvind• 14 years ago

FYI, there is a post from the author, describing some game designs and listing existing bugs (unfortunately, Russian only) - http://habrahabr.ru/post/159501/

In short, he says that sync model used in OpenDune ran very badly in JS, so he had to replace it with async model (thus introducing some bugs).

He also lists hotkeys:

Attack, Move, Harvest, Retreat, Guard, Tab, Build

zemanel• 14 years ago

played a lot of Dune II in programming class back in the days. Also got caught a couple of times. Learned two thing you can't teach in a class room, culture and how to slack like a pro

prawn• 14 years ago

Can you still save and reload until the Death Hand actually hits something useful?

Dune II ported to the Web with Emscripten

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