Linking turn to fire makes the game no fun. I kind of like the idea of limited resources, but this makes all the ships degenerate into spinning drifters that occasionally in a spread. There's no skill at that point.
This all went down while I was on vacation so have limited access. Plan to make some play through videos when I get home. You can follow my progress at: blog.spacefrigates.com or twitter: @spacefrigates
I experienced an "interesting" glitch where the world appeared to rapidly switch back and forth between two diverging states. Almost as if two different servers were continuously updating me with their different opinions of what's going on.
Thank you, much appreciated! I'm just starting out and have lots of plans. Follow my progress on my blog: blog.spacefrigates.com or follow the game on twitter: @spacefrigates
There has been a dedicated community of thousands of players, many of which have been playing well over a decade. Plenty of videos on youtube under either "Subspace" or more recently "Continuum".
Extreme Games is my favorite (large CTF game with a bunch of different bases). Unfortunately it wasn't one of the default zones on the client last I checked and you had to go into the client's server view to add it. Really is one of the best zones. Much more interesting than Trench Wars.
If anybody played Infantry, the EOL zone was based on Extreme Games. Though it would blow my mind if anyone knows what I'm talking about.
EGFL has created some of the tensest gaming experiences in decades with teammates from across the globe. Regular 8 or 9 hour games that were hotly contested.
Lag-attaching as a strategy is an incredible example of how innovative gamers were given latency restraints. :) Shout out to Explosive, my first EG Squad.
I dont remember that many drawn out games in EGFL. Longest one i know of was imp vs mut, which was 12+ hours long. Lag attaching was a dirty bug which just added fun :)
Wow that takes me back. Some incredibly thrilling gaming moments with large numbers of people that climaxed after sometimes literal hours of back and forth.
I was in one of the better clans at the time and the sheer skill of some of those players was astounding.
Since www.rshl.org doesn't appear to be loading here, could you give me an ELI5 on how this differs from Trench Wars (which I still play periodically having owned a copy of Subspace itself) ?
Hockey Zone creatively shortens the bullet lengths for ships and decreases the respawn timer to simulate a hockey check. A powerball serves as the puck, and there is both public games (effectively pickup in recreational sports nomenclature) and a 20+ year running league.
Technically Hockey Zone runs on something called ASSS (a small subspace server) which enables significantly more advanced features than the base client such as instant replay and dynamic scoreboard overlays.
That's fascinating and something I should definitely try one day - I doubt it'll replace Trench Wars in my heart but I bet I'll really enjoy experimenting for a bit.
I wasted so much of my life on this game around 1999-ish. I think one year I looked at my play time and about a third of my waking hours were spent playing.
Got the CTO of the startup I was working at into this game. One day his wife came in and saw me playing and said "Oh, you play this too." And I told her "Yeah, I was the person who introduced So-and-so to it." She hissed out "That was YOU?!" and walked away real fast. Never spoke to me again.
Amazing game - I spent several years in the early 2000s playing a spinoff called Infantry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infantry_(video_game). Sony ran it into the ground and I wound up trying SubSpace since it was supposedly the predecessor and had the same engine, but never got into it.
While typing this up I discovered Infantry is actually still alive, resurrected by some diehards on free player-maintained servers! Can't imagine that happening for any of today's games in twenty years. It's probably just nostalgia, but to me the early 2000s were a special golden age of PC gaming and community that will never be topped.
Definitely one of my favorite games of all time! I liked the server that had the economic model with all the different kinds of guns, shields, and armors it was super fun.
I remember this was the promo game on pepsi.com for a week (I believe I was busy collecting pepsi points for a Harrier jet at the time) and I ended up spending thousands of hours on it. Fantastic game - can't believe how well it worked on 56k.
Can I ask what the compelling gameplay is of this game, where people spend thousands of hours on it? From a distance it doesn't seem like e.g. a bit persistent world, but more of an arena, short one-off games kinda thing; I find it hard to comprehend you could spend thousands of hours on that.
I'd say that SubSpace and its predecessors were the first "haiku-competitives" -- a lineage that eventually resulted in DotA and League of Legends.
Essentially: distill gameplay to a relatively small number of rules + iterate balance until it's incredibly finely tuned + let the playerbase go nuts with whatever strategies they can come up with.
The attraction being that they're easy to pick up (few rules to learn) but incredibly deep (complex interactions and strategies).
Coupled with the fact that circa-late-90s, the idea of an MMO was still mind blowing. Games with friends and strangers?!
From memory, SubSpace also had a fairly addictive loot mechanic (tiered materials, item construction, randomly timed rare enemy spawns).
I spent a summer there. Even playing solo free for all it was so much fun being the top scorer in a zone, having that little trophy next to your ship, and having people hunt you or get blasted. The ships vary, but there's a fast fighter that can one shot kill most things if you are a very good shot, and zoom by other ships on after burners with a little spin, dodging the return fire. That ship can also put a bullet through the openings in walls and bases and sometimes take out a defender. Even spending an entire summer at it, I wasn't the best shot by a long shot.
That's just my experience as well. There are many other types of ships like bombers with big explosive, slow shots with blast effect, and other ships that can have other players attach to them as turrets. If your team in the arena can escort a bomber safely to a base with some fighters, you can often nuke the enemy right through the walls and capture the flag there. Meanwhile if you are just piloting a fighter it's a big win to take out one of the turret ships. Then there's other ships like ones that can cloak and fire sneak attacks, etc..
I remember playing one called Gravitron maybe on my old PC. The kind you launch from the DOS prompt. You have to navigate planetary terrain and defense systems while you're ship is in constant free fall, so you give tiny controlled thrusts to keep from crashing and slide left and right.
The long term vision is to allow players to control much larger ships. True frigate class ships. I'm still in alpha right now but will continue work if there is interest.
Well if you someday write a postmorten of you experience implementing this, the HN dead hug, how to deal with it and so, it will be very helpful. Think about write down your actions everyday so that hypothetical report will be easier to write.
Heh, yes. It played WAY WAY WAY smoother in the late 80s than space frigates plays on my 3+ GHz desktop.
At the time netrek was near unplayable on my 386. But I got the optional 387 FPU and a S3-801 (that had hardware support for vectors) and suddenly netrek, xpilot, and similar vector games played great.
Was about to suggest that myself (but searched and found you already had). I've not looked in recently so I don't know how much development is going on, but I wasted many a bit of time playing this and its variants with a group of friends while at Uni two decades ago.
Key-words for those searching: cross-platform, open source, multi-player, fun.
I like the conservation of angular momentum, a nod to physics realism relatively uncommon in classic space shooters. The "brakes" (down arrow key) seem like they should follow the same rules, though, that you should start moving backward if you fire them too much.
Counterintuitively that's actually not realistic. Distances and velocities in space are so large that the thrust required to change a spacecraft's orientation and angular velocity to essentially any desired value will always be completely trivial compared to the thrust it needs to go anywhere.
Can you be honest, did this actually make the game more fun to you? And why should a pilot, whether in a game or in real space, need to think about conservation of angular momentum when computers can very easily handle that themselves and perform the calculations necessary to emulate simple steering instead?
- Never keep any controls pressed down. Consider each single keypress as a discrete action that consumes energy. The more conservative you are with keypresses, the more energy you keep.
- Because it's busy, you have to accelerate right after spawning, otherwise you're in the hellzone and people will actually spawn inside you, causing instant death.
- The down arrow will brake/stop your ship, no matter which direction you're pointing. This is handy when you approach the edge of the map.
- Try cruising along the edge of the map at a leisurely pace, avoid the center, and pwn slowly.
I figured. Game registers a single keypress as multiple (Firefox / macOS). Keypresses register late (I can notice this especially with brake). Nearly unplayable for me.
Same here, even when I'm alone in the arena. Unplayable. Feel like the packet has to go to the server and back before I see a response in my local craft.
Edit:
Pinging 13 times I got: rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 125.981/217.330/322.054/63.585 ms
>200ms ping average, 64ms median deviation, yeah I bet the packets have to go to the server before it responds and that explains everything. The weird thing is that it was still an issue while I was alone on the server so it can't have been overloaded.
To my own website that's 37.490/39.462/41.610/1.199 ms, so it's not my connection.
I love this. This reminds me a lot of my first experience with teeworlds[1], which came pre-installed with LXLE (a sort of hipster Lubuntu derivative). In both cases my emotions transitioned from "oh, another one of these games", to delight as I realized the ships around me were controlled by other players, to being thoroughly amused by the wonky physics. I love lightweight games where it's super low friction to launch, interact with other players, and sign off.
This brings back unpleasant reminders of my early gaming days, my middle gaming days and my later gaming days, in which I am sitting at the controls struggling to move in a voluntary manner. Fortunately there are other folk there who are kind enough to put me out of my misery, speedily.
It’s unplayable and barely functional. Do you actually like it, or you just like the idea of what it could be?
There has been a multiplayer websocket .io game renaissance ongoing since 2016. Hundreds of multiplayer websocket games have been released in that time and they’re all objectively better than this, tech stack included. People like you are acting like this never happened, and I don’t know how you could actually be unaware of it. Some multiplayer websocket games such as slither.io are a worldwide phenomenon on par with Pokémon Go in terms of popularity.
In light of all that, I’m asking why you think this is cool because it doesn’t make sense to me.
I’m using the Meteor JS full stack framework as the base framework.
Really convenient for an app like this where parts of the code, like the game engine, need to run on the client and server and be identical.
Of course, you could do the same thing with node and web sockets yourself but Meteor JS made it easier for me to get started.
I’m not currently using any client side framework like React or Vue (although both work great in Meteor JS) because I render everything client side in the Canvas tag.
In the future, will probably be moving to the Lance real time JS engine and Pixie for WebGL tendering.
108 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] thread1. I'm too young to die
2. Hey, not too rough
3. Hurt me plenty
4. Ultra-Violence
5. Nightmare!
6. NBN
- I guess enough people here thought it was worth a try
If you want to give it another try now that traffic has died down the performance is a lot better.
Thanks!
(I've done enough ops work to be impressed everything was still loading even if the backends clearly weren't quite keeping up :)
Shall have to try again later.
There has been a dedicated community of thousands of players, many of which have been playing well over a decade. Plenty of videos on youtube under either "Subspace" or more recently "Continuum".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubSpace_(video_game)
Also - a plug for my favorite Zone: HZ. www.rshl.org.
If anybody played Infantry, the EOL zone was based on Extreme Games. Though it would blow my mind if anyone knows what I'm talking about.
Lag-attaching as a strategy is an incredible example of how innovative gamers were given latency restraints. :) Shout out to Explosive, my first EG Squad.
Team-based multi player, slow paced, casual, 10-15 minute games. I got World of Tanks in that category, anything else?
I was in one of the better clans at the time and the sheer skill of some of those players was astounding.
It was also the first game I wrote aimbots for -- which got shared among friends.
TrenchWars warbird sniping was a favorite.
p.s. a fond memory : getting ready to flinch when the thunderclap wav plays upon client execution
Technically Hockey Zone runs on something called ASSS (a small subspace server) which enables significantly more advanced features than the base client such as instant replay and dynamic scoreboard overlays.
Thanks!
Got the CTO of the startup I was working at into this game. One day his wife came in and saw me playing and said "Oh, you play this too." And I told her "Yeah, I was the person who introduced So-and-so to it." She hissed out "That was YOU?!" and walked away real fast. Never spoke to me again.
Wasted many hours on that game, was truly ahead of it's time in '95 with massive zones and lag compensation.
While typing this up I discovered Infantry is actually still alive, resurrected by some diehards on free player-maintained servers! Can't imagine that happening for any of today's games in twenty years. It's probably just nostalgia, but to me the early 2000s were a special golden age of PC gaming and community that will never be topped.
[1] https://lutris.net/games/subspace-continuum/
[2] https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio...
1: https://steamcommunity.com/app/352700/discussions/0/16960406...
P.S. the chat can be quite toxic though. It changed for the worse in the last four years.
Essentially: distill gameplay to a relatively small number of rules + iterate balance until it's incredibly finely tuned + let the playerbase go nuts with whatever strategies they can come up with.
The attraction being that they're easy to pick up (few rules to learn) but incredibly deep (complex interactions and strategies).
Coupled with the fact that circa-late-90s, the idea of an MMO was still mind blowing. Games with friends and strangers?!
From memory, SubSpace also had a fairly addictive loot mechanic (tiered materials, item construction, randomly timed rare enemy spawns).
That's just my experience as well. There are many other types of ships like bombers with big explosive, slow shots with blast effect, and other ships that can have other players attach to them as turrets. If your team in the arena can escort a bomber safely to a base with some fighters, you can often nuke the enemy right through the walls and capture the flag there. Meanwhile if you are just piloting a fighter it's a big win to take out one of the turret ships. Then there's other ships like ones that can cloak and fire sneak attacks, etc..
Screw Spiders.
I’m working on mobile controls right now that will allow play on mobile browsers. Hope to have that done in the next week.
You can check out my progress here: https://blog.spacefrigates.com
You can follow at https://blog.spacefrigates.com
At the time netrek was near unplayable on my 386. But I got the optional 387 FPU and a S3-801 (that had hardware support for vectors) and suddenly netrek, xpilot, and similar vector games played great.
8 vs 8 (plus up to 16 spectators) e-sports in the mid 90s!
https://twitter.com/spacefrigates
Key-words for those searching: cross-platform, open source, multi-player, fun.
https://endless-sky.github.io
Is there a multiplayer (specifically, co-op) option?
You can follow along with my progress at: https://blog.spacefrigates.com
I left the brakes as is for now because the game was very difficult with out them.
However, to retain the level of realism that I was hoping for I plan to rework the brakes such that they show the ship slows to a stop properly.
For example, the onboard computer should calculate the actual thrusters needed to stop the ship for the player.
- Never keep any controls pressed down. Consider each single keypress as a discrete action that consumes energy. The more conservative you are with keypresses, the more energy you keep.
- Because it's busy, you have to accelerate right after spawning, otherwise you're in the hellzone and people will actually spawn inside you, causing instant death.
- The down arrow will brake/stop your ship, no matter which direction you're pointing. This is handy when you approach the edge of the map.
- Try cruising along the edge of the map at a leisurely pace, avoid the center, and pwn slowly.
Edit:
Pinging 13 times I got: rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 125.981/217.330/322.054/63.585 ms
>200ms ping average, 64ms median deviation, yeah I bet the packets have to go to the server before it responds and that explains everything. The weird thing is that it was still an issue while I was alone on the server so it can't have been overloaded.
To my own website that's 37.490/39.462/41.610/1.199 ms, so it's not my connection.
[1] https://teeworlds.com/
There has been a multiplayer websocket .io game renaissance ongoing since 2016. Hundreds of multiplayer websocket games have been released in that time and they’re all objectively better than this, tech stack included. People like you are acting like this never happened, and I don’t know how you could actually be unaware of it. Some multiplayer websocket games such as slither.io are a worldwide phenomenon on par with Pokémon Go in terms of popularity.
In light of all that, I’m asking why you think this is cool because it doesn’t make sense to me.
I’m using the Meteor JS full stack framework as the base framework.
Really convenient for an app like this where parts of the code, like the game engine, need to run on the client and server and be identical.
Of course, you could do the same thing with node and web sockets yourself but Meteor JS made it easier for me to get started.
I’m not currently using any client side framework like React or Vue (although both work great in Meteor JS) because I render everything client side in the Canvas tag.
In the future, will probably be moving to the Lance real time JS engine and Pixie for WebGL tendering.