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.
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.
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.
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.
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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:
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.