[joshes]

Could this be an April Fools gag?

I wish I had screencapped it, but at one point I found myself in the middle of the screen, watching four swarm-like quadrants of fellow ships (top-left, top-right, bottom-left and bottom-right) all moving in relative unison. Anytime a swarm started to get close to me, I would inch away for a few seconds before the swarm turned back. I was able to stay in this middle, peaceful area for an extremely long time before random stray fire eventually finished me off.

[unimpressive]

A quick removal of your network cable proves it a hoax.

I almost want to learn JS and Node to build a real one. Just to spite the OP.

[farnsworth]

I worked on a Node-based multiplayer Snake game for a while last summer, and was really excited to see this post. I was hoping the code would be public so I could see how he handled the sync issues. Took me a few minutes to figure it out... disappointment of the week.

If anyone is curious or wants to hack on something like this, you could check out my (unpolished) code: https://github.com/roblourens/nodesnake . My first crack at both Node and a multiplayer real-time game.

Edit - and the game is still live at http://aws.roblourens.com/ but looks like it may be a little buggy yet - I wish I'd known something like this was going to be on the front page of HN, I would have taken another look at this project and tried to have a polished demo!

[stcredzero]

I do want to build a real one. However, I was going to build in command lag as part of the game. Weapons would be player "aimed," but they would be beam weapons that would activate if there were a weapons "lock" and if the ship were pointed in the right direction. There would also be missiles and area effect weapons. The point is to design a game based on dodging and positional tactics.

[unimpressive]

>The point is to design a game based on dodging and positional tactics.

Sounds familiar...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacewar!

PS: If you could do the awesome phosphor glow of the oscilloscope that the PDP used for a display; It'd make your game even more awesome.

[stcredzero]

Sounds familiar...(Spacewar)

I'm old enough to have played the Arcade Cabinet version of this game as a kid. Not exactly what I'm talking about, but perhaps an inspiration.

PS: If you could do the awesome phosphor glow of the oscilloscope that the PDP used for a display; It'd make your game even more awesome.

I'll keep that in mind.

[unimpressive]

>I'm old enough to have played the Arcade Cabinet version of this game as a kid. Not exactly what I'm talking about, but perhaps an inspiration.

I knew it wasn't exactly what you were talking about, but the general concept is similar. I like to think of it as an improved iteration.

>I'll keep that in mind.

If you're not sure what it looks like:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bzWnaH-0sg

Though for the sake of modern players eyes, pretend that the flickering never happened. (;

(More footage showing a full round: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvGzAvNLcew)

EDIT: Considering what you've said in other comments. Maybe the best way to implement this would be a skin that players can buy as an upgrade?

[ragmondo]

Nooooo. Use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xpilot instead ! Far more fun.

[astrofinch]

You should make ships distinguishable so informal alliances can form.

[calebmpeterson]

Yes. Please do.

[tomg]

> I almost want to learn JS and Node to build a real one. Just to spite the OP.

I've been doing just that for the last couple weekends. You can see the work in progress at: http://okayarcade.com/everybody-shoot-everybody/

Note: The link will eventually die (since it's a really early iteration I quickly published when I saw this HN thread; you can't even shoot anyone else) when I take it back down. Uses ImpactJS, NodeJS, and Socket.IO.

edit: Controls: arrow keys = move;

edit 2: I'll probably be open sourcing the game (at least the non ImpactJS parts) once it's more production ready.

[bitwize]

There's a real one, it's called xpilot.

Not browser based, but still MMO.

[unimpressive]

Yeah. But the whole point is that it's an cool HTML5 demo.

[DoublePlusWill]

Here's a good screenshot I got after playing for 10 minutes. This tended to happen to me about every 1-2 minutes. Either those are some incredibly synchronized humans or it's just an April fool's joke.

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/832/screenshot20120401a...

[i_cannot_hack]

You are right, this is not multiplayer.

How I know? I turned off my internet connection, and the game continued to work .

[abend]

Same thing happened to me.

[hobin]

Yes. Another way to see this is that few (perhaps even none at all) other ships are constantly firing at maximum rate. If this were multiplayer, that'd be what most people would be doing.

[Kiro]

Yeah, the ships are not moving "natural" at all. If this is just a joke I must say I'm disappointed.

[matthewgifford]

It's easy to get this to happen. Just stay motionless until you have the attention of 3 or 4 ships. Then book it in a straight line. Suddenly, it zooms out and the ships start behaving like schools of fish.

[raquo]

Pro tip: if you're getting such non-random behavior, just clear your seb.ly cookie and you can play normally again. I'm guessing the more you play, the higher chance of non-random behavior there is, so that players gradually realize it's a hoax.

[zedr]

Try unplugging the network cable.

[Kiro]

I just did and it's either so next level you no longer need a network connection to play against 2000 other players or a hoax.

[wildbunny]

For those who can't be bothered - the game just keeps playing, with all the players following/attacking etc.

I.e - it's fake. Such a shame!

[Kiro]

All the ships on the screen just stopped flying around and started shooting at me in sync.

Ok, it happend again now... Something strange is definitely going on.

[jbverschoor]

same here

[wildbunny]

Fiddler shows a connection to node.seb.ly on keep alive - not sure if any data is getting sent/received though....