Show HN: I'm open-sourcing my game engine (opens in new tab)

I should have started out by saying this looks really neat, which is why I downloaded it to try out on my phone! :) thanks for sharing! Sorry my only comment was a criticism/question.

Looking forward to trying it out on the computer instead!

It's not super hard in principle. I work with car manufacturers, we have to let the user login via their OEM account. In theory they say it's all compliant, but then many parts don't work and take ages for them to get fixed.

What you described should really not happen though, I thought Google forbid this already

This is called OAuth 2.0 and is trivial to implement with something like Okta.

A combination of good capabilities, ease of learning, and low commitment (casual, a few days or even hours of effort to meaningful result) can go a long way. Remember Flash.

We have an active community who are creating between 150 to 300 new games every day. Having a low-barrier of entry for both game devs & players def helps. (No download/signup required)

I play a lot of games and sold some in the past, but I’ve never heard the term. What is an IO game?

Movements pretty tight in our websockets:

https://gooberdash.winterpixel.io/

It's all about the client side prediction & roll back networking algorithm. Our game states end up being ~1kb at 30hz, which typically fits into a single packet, so websockets aren't terrible. An unreliable protocol would be better, of course.

>The movement was a bit janky, as expected from websockets

Could you elaborate on this? I played a few "io games" and it seemed pretty smooth (except for the occasional laggy player).

On the other hand, I did a bit of testing with WebSockets a few months ago. If I understand correctly, there are significant downsides to using TCP for games (or any latency sensitive communications for that matter): TCP header being >2x bigger than UDP, additional control packets, and TCP delays transmission of new data while old (stale) data is retransmitted. So WebSockets have these same downsides, due to being hosted over TCP.

Despite all that (TCP supposedly guaranteeing delivery of WebSocket messages), I was able to produce packet loss. So you have the downsides, and as far as I can tell you don't really have the upside, since if you actually want guaranteed delivery you still need to build your own thing on top of it (which you could have just done on top of UDP in the first place, at least for messages that need it!)

(Take this with a grain of salt, aside from a bit of dabbling I have close to zero knowledge and experience with networking.)

CJK characters occupy a vast portion of the printable Unicode characters. [1] Two of the largest blocks include

* U+3400 to U+4DBF

* U+4E00 to U+9FFF

Your string decodes to \u57d2\u6111\u48d4\u6a64\u3930\u3099\u37cd\u7a26\u7366\u0999\u60dd\u44c7\u5f37\u681b\u4ccc\u06ec\u4303\u0329\u4f7c

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CJK_Unified_Ideographs

I'm going to start a blog!

And by "start a blog" I mean write a whole new blog engine entirely from the ground up...

Can you elaborate on what part of moddio you're referring to? Was it a product of a failed attempt to create a game?

Most people who write engines probably don't actually want to make games in the first place and would rather be making engines anyway.

amen to that! (own experience)

I don’t see why. Connection-wise, the node event would loop make I/o blocking from the http request / response side a non issue. I doubt the backend is doing physics heavy stuff for the front end.

They use uWebSockets (https://github.com/uNetworking/uWebSockets), which was written in C, but has an interface to use in NodeJS. It's been really performant for me in my simple tests compared to other popular websocket libs that slow down fairly quickly.

I get the feeling that the bottleneck in most IO games is the IO (no pun intended, the genre name comes from the TLD), which makes Node a good choice.

Scaling can indeed become a consideration, especially with a large number of connections. In our case, we've optimized our backend to handle a substantial number of concurrent connections efficiently. Also, each game is limited to 64 players max, although we tested up to 100+ connections and didn't notice any performance issues. Each game runs in isolated containers.

Thanks for the question. We consciously decided to make our engine more opinionated compared to other modular alternatives, because we want to be extremely fast at developing 2D multiplayer games. For example, I made a simple MMORPG in 2 hours (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZVsxkALR5U).

I believe that there's an inverse correlation between ease-of-use and level-of-customization. We chose the former to address the gap between casual game devs and multiplayer games which are known to be difficult to build.

"What's it for?"

Apparently not for you, but people who want to build such a specific game. Not every engine is general purpose.

sounds exciting! let us know if you have any questions. we have a Discord link on our homepage as well.

I wouldn't recommend you modify the JSON directly, as it's quite illegible and bloated. There are actions in modd.io that allow you to modify the map directly. One creator in our community is dynamically generating the map using ChatGPT. He's building a hide & seek sends a prompt to generate 2D map JSON then loads it in the map every time the new game round begins. I'd share the game, but he hasn't published it yet.

Also, there is a community member who's building an interpreter for our game JSON such as https://pypi.org/project/pymodd/

Please don't get it the wrong way, this is genuine question. Why is under 100 stars on GitHub surprising?

Perhaps because they just made it public?

Oh, I've already done this! Happy to help. Feel free to DM me here on Discord. (I should probably make a YouTube tutorial for this)

Thanks!

Thank you for checking it out!

It's an extremely bad idea to go and build from scratch a do-everything game engine with AAA 3D capabilities, but there is absolutely space for engines with a very specific focus.

If you want to make a VN, would you rather open up a blank project in Unity or just use Ren'Py?

In the commercial space, RPG Maker and GameMaker continue to exist.

With Unity, the trust is gone. I don't think there's ever been a good time to be in the game engine business but this is probably the best time.

This is an unfair comparison imo. Just because Dewalt (or similar) sell a comprehensive toolbox does not mean people won't pay for a standalone screwdriver. It all depends on what people feel they need.