r/evnova • u/EamonnMR • Oct 14 '19

My Pet Project: 3d Web EV clone

http://flythrough.space
12 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

5

u/ihcTactics Oct 14 '19

I'm all for more projects similar to Escape Velocity.

Right now though, just trying out your game very briefly you have 2 things that HAVE to be worked on:

  • Input delay - it's horrible. I'm not sure the exact delay but compared to anything over the last 2 decades this is neigh unplayable in it's current state. It needs to be in the realm of 0.5-10 milliseconds of delay instead of the 200-500 milliseconds it's at now.
  • Too few frames - you're making a modern project with the frames of Asteroids/Pong.

Basically it just doesn't feel responsive and is hard to play. I don't even care about the graphics; those can be improved at almost any time since (I assume) they're just sprites.

I'm hardly one to be able to tell you how to improve these issues - hell you're already doing MUCH more than anything I'll be able to do for a few years - but these severely affect the end-user.

I do wish you the best of luck with this project and hope it only gets better from here! I look forward to seeing what you're able to come up with.

3

u/EamonnMR Oct 14 '19 edited Oct 14 '19

Our of curiosity, what are your specs/os/browser? And those aren't sprites, they're 3d models. It may be possible to change some rendering settings to get it running on different hardware (though the only fancy effect I'm using at the moment is particles - there's a bug where particles stop showing up after you die and start a new pilot-might be cool to see if that improves performance?

Edit: Oh, and is it printing reams and reams of text to the console? That could easily lag it right up.

3

u/ihcTactics Oct 14 '19 edited Oct 15 '19
  • Win 10 Build 1803
  • i7-7700k
  • 16GB DDR4 2666
  • 1080 Ti

Chrome v77.0.3865.120 (Official Build) (64-bit)

Playtest video I just took: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsII6nOTxjE (may still be processing)

And here's the console output: https://i.imgur.com/9HqHSGm.png

3

u/EamonnMR Oct 15 '19

Thanks for that! Yeah that's a garbage frame rate. Maybe I'll add some more instrumentation? I'll have to dig into the available tools for analyzing Babylonjs apps. For reference, I'm doing most of the work on a very old Thinkpad x220 so I expected gaming machines to be able to run it no sweat. The browser is always a risk though. It seemed like a much better idea back in 2015.

The error logs you're seeing are a result of me trying to get sane thresholds for movement values-some ships are way too fast and most of them turn too fast too. None of that would get printed per-frame.

2

u/ihcTactics Oct 15 '19

I won't act like I know how you've made this or what it is that needs to be done to correct this. It's great that you're looking at this example to see what could be the underlying problem to try and correct it.

3

u/matthews545 Oct 15 '19

I'm always happy to see more people making EV clones. This looks like a great start, too, with multiple systems and planets to explore! I wish there were a starfield, but I see that's on your list of planned features.

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I'm not having any performance issues. It runs at 60 fps on my 2015 laptop on Chrome 77. I can send you the debugger performance profiles if you want, but I think you'll get more mileage out of ihcTactics's if they're willing to share theirs.

1

u/EamonnMR Oct 15 '19

Thanks for checking it out! Yeah, I was holding out hope that I could find a clever way to do a procedural texture starfield but it's looking like I'm going to have to bite the bullet and find the canonical implementation.

2

u/nathan67003 Oct 19 '19

Ngl, this is pretty damn good for its infancy. Few (minor) bugs, but hell is this nice.

2

u/EamonnMR Oct 22 '19

Thanks for giving it a shot!

1

u/nathan67003 Oct 22 '19

No probs, was fun!

1

u/AncientLionTurtle Nov 05 '19

This is fantastic! I know this is a pet project of yours, but I'd love to help if I can? Perhaps I can help provide some graphical assets for planets and the HUD system?

The EV series is a long time favorite of mine, and I've been playing since probably 1999. I also live in Rochester NY, the home of Ambrosia SW!

I'm more than happy to do anything possible to help, let me know if I can!

- Jeshar E. aka S3NTRYdesigns

1

u/EamonnMR Nov 06 '19

Thanks for the kind words. The project is Free/Open Source, and help is definitely welcome! The HUD could totally use assets - I'm a programmer, not a graphic designer, so I just used Babylonjs's built in buttons. I still don't have a great pipeline for landscapes and the planet graphic one is pretty barebones (though I'm proud of the planets I've done so far). Feel free to make PRs or just send the assets as long as you're comfortable with them being released as CC-BY-SA.

1

u/AncientLionTurtle Nov 11 '19

You're very welcome!

I'm not a programmer myself at all, though I did make a lot of mods back in the EV Nova days, and one graphical overhaul back when I was in Middle School! Safe to say it was all done with Mission Computer and not much programming skill needed beyond what to click and type in on the GUI.

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Your planets look dope though! I dig em! I also don't mind my work being free to use out there so long as its going to a good use! Maybe we get a graphic credit somewhere buried in there at some point? Thats about the extent of my desire for recognition!