Asp Forum - Web-based games?

Hal E. Fulton

3/28/2008 7:11:00 AM

Who's interested in developing a few web-based games?

I'll try to follow this thread, but please feel free
to email me... rubyhacker@gmail.com

There are several kinds of games, of course...

1. Solo -- cards (solitaire), puzzles, Sudoku, etc.

2. One on one, realtime or not -- cards, chess, checkers,
Hnefltafl, Othello, and so on. (Some of these would
be deadly dull in non-realtime.)

3. One against many -- trivia, etc.

4. I'll probably avoid MMORPG and such for now.

5. I also have a cool three-player game in mind -- a chess
variant that I (thought I) made up (though someone else
created something virtually identical ten years earlier).

Let's talk...

Cheers,
Hal

27 Answers

Jesús Gabriel y Galán

3/28/2008 8:24:00 AM

On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 8:10 AM, Hal Fulton <hal9000@hypermetrics.com> wrote:
> Who's interested in developing a few web-based games?

I have a continuous personal project to make a game web,
but I'm focused on turn board games like Alhambra, Citadels, Ticket to
Ride, etc.
The problem is that I have 0 time (I have two daughters age 18 months
and 5 months).
I have 90% of Alhambra's engine already coded, and I've started Citadels,
but in command line, and now I was taking the opportunity to learn Shoes and
Ramaze to make some GUIs.

My idea is to build non-realtime games in the line of
(http://ciudadelas.freno...)
but for more games. You go to the website, play your turn, next player
receives an email,
etc.

Anyway, I'm really interested in web-based games...

Jesus.

James Gray

3/28/2008 12:26:00 PM

On Mar 28, 2008, at 2:10 AM, Hal Fulton wrote:

> Who's interested in developing a few web-based games?

I've been working on a Web based game for a while now. It's a turn-
based strategy game based on an old game practically no one ever heard
of. I made a lot of changes to it though and it's really a different
beast now.

My friends and I have fiddled with a prototype I made and had some fun
with it. I'm now trying to get a public version ready to go. I'm
getting fairly close to having that, but work has been busy lately and
slowing me down.

James Edward Gray II

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

3/28/2008 1:40:00 PM

Hal Fulton wrote:
> Who's interested in developing a few web-based games?
>
> I'll try to follow this thread, but please feel free
> to email me... rubyhacker@gmail.com
>
> There are several kinds of games, of course...
>
> 1. Solo -- cards (solitaire), puzzles, Sudoku, etc.
>
> 2. One on one, realtime or not -- cards, chess, checkers,
> Hnefltafl, Othello, and so on. (Some of these would
> be deadly dull in non-realtime.)
>
> 3. One against many -- trivia, etc.
>
> 4. I'll probably avoid MMORPG and such for now.
>
> 5. I also have a cool three-player game in mind -- a chess
> variant that I (thought I) made up (though someone else
> created something virtually identical ten years earlier).
>
>
> Let's talk...
>
> Cheers,
> Hal
>
>

1. I've just started playing a web-based MMORPG called Ikariam ... it's
sort of a "Second Life" set in the ancient world. It's written in PHP,
though. I think something like that is a natural for a Rails app.

2. Be careful about intellectual property, especially trademarks,
branding, etc. You'd be surprised how many ways you can get someone to
hire an attorney and sue you. :)

I'm buried in a bunch of other projects at the moment, but since I
discovered Ikariam I've been toying with the idea of doing a space-based
MMORPG in Rails. Another thing I've looked at is a "management
simulation" game, where you get to build big multinational corporations
and compete with each other. That's somewhat like Ikariam, actually.

Todd Benson

3/28/2008 2:01:00 PM

On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 8:40 AM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
<znmeb@cesmail.net> wrote:

> 2. Be careful about intellectual property, especially trademarks,
> branding, etc. You'd be surprised how many ways you can get someone to
> hire an attorney and sue you. :)

No kidding. I've been thinking about doing a Monopoly or Clue game
with AI players, but I don't think it's legally possible.

Todd

John Joyce

3/29/2008 12:14:00 AM

On Mar 28, 2008, at 8:40 AM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

> Hal Fulton wrote:
>> Who's interested in developing a few web-based games?
>> I'll try to follow this thread, but please feel free
>> to email me... rubyhacker@gmail.com
>> There are several kinds of games, of course...
>> 1. Solo -- cards (solitaire), puzzles, Sudoku, etc.
>> 2. One on one, realtime or not -- cards, chess, checkers,
>> Hnefltafl, Othello, and so on. (Some of these would
>> be deadly dull in non-realtime.)
>> 3. One against many -- trivia, etc.
>> 4. I'll probably avoid MMORPG and such for now.
>> 5. I also have a cool three-player game in mind -- a chess
>> variant that I (thought I) made up (though someone else
>> created something virtually identical ten years earlier).
>> Let's talk...
>> Cheers,
>> Hal
>
> 1. I've just started playing a web-based MMORPG called Ikariam ...
> it's sort of a "Second Life" set in the ancient world. It's written
> in PHP, though. I think something like that is a natural for a
> Rails app.
>
> 2. Be careful about intellectual property, especially trademarks,
> branding, etc. You'd be surprised how many ways you can get someone
> to hire an attorney and sue you. :)
>
> I'm buried in a bunch of other projects at the moment, but since I
> discovered Ikariam I've been toying with the idea of doing a space-
> based MMORPG in Rails. Another thing I've looked at is a
> "management simulation" game, where you get to build big
> multinational corporations and compete with each other. That's
> somewhat like Ikariam, actually.
>
I would not recommend Rails for a MMORPG. It's not going to scale to
that well.

Marc Heiler

3/29/2008 2:42:00 AM

> Be careful about intellectual property, especially trademarks,
> branding, etc. You'd be surprised how many ways you can get someone to
> hire an attorney and sue you. :)

I think people are overly nervous about this. Now let me first state
that I do of course encourage everyone to use their own artwork, but I
have a certain strong stance against attorney-trolls (only the trolls,
not against attorney's in general), and in my personal experience people
often overestimate their sue-power. But this might be that I am not
living in the USA ;-)
I know of several projects that started (or still have) artwork that is
claimed and used somewhere else (and before they used it).
In most cases the artwork has been replaced completely. In some cases
even with better artwork.

My basic point actually is that, while artwork is extremely important to
a game, I believe ultimately the logic behind the game (that it works)
is more important - at least to "ignite" interest to other people into a
project. (And dont get me wrong here again, I am well aware of people
that frantically point out about "thief" - which is funny insofar
because they are not representing anyone at all except their "concern".
They could opt to simply not waste any time with such a game, but
instead opt to argue and argue for long time about it...

Ok, back to another point I would like to make, and I want to make it
rather clear, even if Rails people get mad at me:

> I would not recommend Rails for a MMORPG. It's not going to scale to
> that well.
I think that is a fair comparison, but we may disagree about the term
MMORPG. When one says MMORPG these days I immediately think about World
of Wa***ft.
But a browser game should be much simpler and less resource-wasting than
that, and I think if Rails does not scale well for a simple browser
based game, it would not be worth anything at all.

Finally, back to the thread starter:

> Who's interested in developing a few web-based games?
I am interested but only in a flexible framework. (And I unfortunately
have time constraints as well)
What I would personally love to see would be a framework that is
perfectly adequate to develop browser based games.

I played around ... 15 different browser based games over time, maybe 3
of them for actually a long time (one of that I started playing in
1999... had a quite nice concept but the korean company went bankrupt
after some years, and a "clone" appeared which was quite nice, added a
lot of new stuff etc... but also changed the game more and more over
time, up to the point that it was a completely different game, with
different problems, and the biggest problem being that "old" players
were largely ignored when the code was "adapted"...)

So a framework for developing browser based games in an easy fashion
would something I'd try to help out/would love to see implemented.
--
Posted via http://www.ruby-....

Stephen Cox

3/29/2008 11:23:00 AM

There is a company that produces a whole slew of online games at
http://www.s.... I loved their strategy game, Hegemony. Was fun
(don't play it much since all my gaming time is trapped in Warcraft).

I don't know what language they use to write these games. Have a look
(and no I don't work for them).

I can't see using rails for this project.
--
Posted via http://www.ruby-....

Eleanor McHugh

3/30/2008 4:26:00 PM

I'm currently addicted to BattleMaster (http://www.battle...)
which is written in PHP. This sort of game could very easily be done
in Rails though, or probably even Camping :)

Ellie

Eleanor McHugh
Games With Brains
http://slides.games-with-b...
----
raise ArgumentError unless @reality.responds_to? :reason

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

3/30/2008 5:03:00 PM

Eleanor McHugh wrote:
> I'm currently addicted to BattleMaster (http://www.battle...)
> which is written in PHP. This sort of game could very easily be done in
> Rails though, or probably even Camping :)
>
>
> Ellie
>
> Eleanor McHugh
> Games With Brains
> http://slides.games-with-b...
> ----
> raise ArgumentError unless @reality.responds_to? :reason
>
>
>
>

Looks a bit like Ikariam in its demands on players. I spend maybe an
hour a day in Ikariam ... once you realize how long things take, you can
play it in bursts. And Ikariam does look like it could be done in Rails,
although

1. I wouldn't mount a free browser-based game in *any* language.
2. It's not really pay-for-play quality and may never be. They are
talking about adding some "convenience" features for people who want to
pay, but until they clean up the core, nobody is going to pay for it.

I think a Rails-based browser game would be easier to maintain and
enhance/evolve that one written in PHP, but I don't see the point in
creating a game that people won't pay money to play.

Bill Kelly

3/30/2008 7:30:00 PM

From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@cesmail.net>
>
> I think a Rails-based browser game would be easier to maintain and
> enhance/evolve that one written in PHP, but I don't see the point in
> creating a game that people won't pay money to play.

Another approach that might yield something more eye catching than
traditional browser-based games, could be to implement the game as
a Java applet. I recall seeing JRuby running in an applet... and
the Java APIs for graphics appear to have have finally matured to
point where high-quality hardware assisted rendering is now possible
in applets.

Even OpenGL support in browser applets is near ubiquitous now.
I've asked several gamers to try this OpenGL applet demo, and as I
recall it worked for all of them, after a one-time update to the
latest JRE if they had an older Java version installed:

https://jogl-demos.dev.java.net/apple...

There's also the Lightweight Java Game Library, which supports
applets: http://www....

And a 2D game library which I believe is based on top of LWJGL:
http://slick.cokeandcode.com...

Of course... this is all probably moot unless JRuby can be
applied to the problem, right? <grin>

Hmmmmmmm.... Seems as of last September, at least, there were
still some issues:

http://mountaindude.blogspot.com/2007/09/jruby-in-a...

Oh well... I was hoping we were finally at the point where
we could easily write some high quality applet games in JRuby,
but it looks like we're not _quite_ there yet...

Regards,

Bill

comp.lang.ruby

Web-based games?

Hal E. Fulton

Jesús Gabriel y Galán

James Gray

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

Todd Benson

John Joyce

Marc Heiler

Stephen Cox

Eleanor McHugh

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

Bill Kelly

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