With all my heart, I want to cheer you on. Making stuff is damn hard, and shipping is even harder. You did that, and I applaud you for it.
I do a lot of NYT puzzle stuff every day and some other random puzzle sites before I get out of bed. That said, I'm over 40, love puzzles, love complicated board games, went through your brief explainer, and could not get a sensible handle on how to even start this thing. A new player has to really care about how to even try to begin to figure out whatever this is. I gave it about 20 seconds after the "how does it work?" Honestly, I gave up. I'm really not trying to rain on your parade. You might find a niche audience, and it'll be what you're going for, but I think you need a much, much better rules explainer if you want to be even remotely in the vicinity of a Wordle-level banger.
This thing might be really awesome, but not being able to figure out how to use it is a hard out for me.
It sounds like you read the instructions but they weren’t enough. Maybe a video explainer would be better? Does the gameplay recording on this Reddit post help at all?
People really seem to like it once it clicks (Over 1100 people have finished the daily puzzle so far today) but there is a steep learning curve and I’d love to learn how to help people get past that initial hump.
That was a fun little game! The hinting felt appropriate, only thing I didn't really like was that it got a bit "cramped" towards the end moving things around. Will try it again tomorrow. :)
There are not many sites I whitelist for javascript, or even bookmark these day. Really glad I tried your game, it's fun and nicely executed. Well done to you both.
Good fun. I discovered a big though. I could not yet reproduce it, but I managed to somehow have letters glitch out of the Tetris shapes they are in. When I move the tiles or rotate them, the letters are back where they should be. So it's not game breaking, but seems to happen in some case. At first I suspected, that it was because my phone was locked in between, but I tried that and when locking it manually, that bug did not happen. So no idea, sorry!
Ahh dang I’ve had a few people report this but I haven’t been able to reproduce it. I think it does have something to do with locking your screen and coming back but I haven’t figured it out yet
This is really fun — have you played with making the tile position opinionated (not agnostic)?
i wonder if have the clues point to a starting square (e.g., "E5") would be better than the current "reveal" aid. The spatial information would become more helpful toward the end when the player is dealing with the words they need help on.
Really great! One of the things that Wordle did that I thought was very clever was having a copy and paste social media preview of how you did. It might be worth adding that for vitality... you could even add an image preview with Open Graph meta tags if you were clever.
Thanks, yeah I’d like to improve this. There is a “share” option when you complete a level but I don’t think it works as well as Wordle’s in terms of storytelling.
Nice! Some feedback from my wife, who is into all manner of word games: she found it a little bit brute-forcey: needing to try all different combinations in order to get the right configuration of the word. In contrast to a crossword where there is already a layout, which gives her a hint for how to proceed with the rest.
(She finished today's puzzle, and I gave up.) From a UI perspective it is very slick - very smooth, and I like how it kind of "gets" what you were trying to do when providing corrections/hints.
This is really well made! As someone who has built daily puzzle games (ex. sidewords.ca, kickoffleague.com, and just today fivefold.ca), I appreciate the effort it takes to make something that polished! It plays really well on mobile, which is tricky, especially when you’ve got a grid as big as yours.
I saw your Show HN post a few weeks ago! Really appreciate the smoothness of your UI and the simplicity of your onboarding, I see how much you have dialed in. I've been working on a daily puzzle game too (it's getting there...), maybe you'd enjoy it https://slab17.com/
I solved the first puzzle:
-Congratulations!
-You solved Paprika with 18 slabs
But this was unclear:
-You've solved 0 puzzles!
-Reveal Rule
-Next Puzzle
-View Archive
-You still have 2 guesses left. Finish guessing before revealing the rule if you're feeling brave!
I have to do 2 more guesses before I can reveal the rule that I already figured out?
This game was Show HNed two times in ten days, [1][2], but unfortunately, it didn't get as much attention as it should! Ironically, this current thread has already gained almost double the comments from both submissions combined!
I whish you best of luck to succeed in your journey.
I’m enjoying this a lot and even got my partner playing. We did one together and now they are off working through puzzles because they liked it so much.
The game design is really good too. It has just the right amount of juice.
Nice! What might be a nice lesser 'clue' to simply revealing a word is highlighting letter(s) on the board that are part of it? Favouring maybe highlighting letters that are contiguous with a blue bit?
I really enjoyed this! wondering about a possible "scratch" section or larger area - found myself spending a lot of time moving pieces around to get enough space
I showcased at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo with the Portland Indie Game squad and that got me some players. I also shared it on my various personal social medias. The neighborhood board game store let me put up a poster!
I’m also hoping that organic sharing will drive growth.
This HN comment has been some of my most successful marketing so far. Around 2400 people from HN have visited since I posted!
I was getting a little bored of retrocomputing discourse being so centered on gaming, so I'm exploring the productivity software of the 8/16-bit era. I put real effort into learning and using the programs, giving my light-hearted but heartfelt assessment of its form and function for both its time and today.
Using the software inevitably gets me thinking about other things, and I explore those threads as well. For example, "Superbase on the C64" also discusses the legacy and promise of "the paperless office." A couple of other posts got some nice traction here on HN, notably "Deluxe Paint on the Amiga" and "VisiCalc on the Apple 2".
I'm hoping to build a strong monthly readership, so I'm putting in the work. It's been up for two months and five posts now, with a new one coming at the end of this week.
I think this software archaeology / history-keeping is really important. Keep up the good work. These paragraphs resonate with me:
> There is utility in those old tools and interesting ideas to be mined. Recently I stumbled across something that by all accounts should have set the world on fire, but whose ideas needed more time to germinate before blossoming much later. Discoveries like this are not just nostalgic “what ifs” to opine wistfully upon, they can be dormant seeds of the future.
> Computing moves at such an unrelenting pace, those seeds may lie dormant for any number of reasons: bad marketing, released on a dying platform, too expensive, or even too large a mental leap for the public to “get” at the time. I see this blog as a way to explore the history of the work tools we use every day. I don’t do this out of misty-eyed sentimentality, but rather pragmatic curiosity. The past isn’t sacred, but it is still useful.
What's your research process? Do you use lots of Internet Archive material? Do you reference any personal artifacts i.e. old hardware or documentation laying around? Any interviewing?
Thanks for the kind feedback, and I'm happy you felt resonance with those words. I use tons of Internet Archive material, but also stuff from various retro enthusiast sites which focus on specific hardware platforms. Lots of books, I look through YouTube for interviews, and include my own personal history with the machines and genres (I don't want the blog to read like a passionless how-to manual). If I had the physical space for a hardware collection I'd do that, but alas. No interviewing of my own, just research into existing interviews up to present day. The main point is really to let the software speak for itself and see if it and I can be friends.
That's interesting. I agree that outside of gaming you really don't see much being done with the old systems.
My first job out of college was with a tiny, now-defunct company that built simple I/O hardware for 8-bit systems. One of the "side products" was a MacPaint clone for the Radio Shack Color Computer II called CoCoMax. We didn't write it: AFAIK, the programmer for the original version contacted the company and asked if they wanted to buy it and pay him royalties. He later went off and built an even more successful product used in TV stations called the Video Toaster. Side product or not, CoCoMax was a cash cow!
On the heels of that success, another programmer who'd written a more advanced version for the Color Computer 3 offered the same deal. From what I recall, they both made buttloads of money from their royalties.
Sometimes I wish I had kept some of that old hardware & software, but it's long gone.
Your website is amazing! I've being complaining recently to some coworkers that current software is often bloated, full of things that are only distractions and due to all the accidental complexity, full of bugs and slow.
One day, at work, Gnome stopped working due to some javascript issue and KDE at home due to something similar (I guess) and as I had to get some stuff done, I just installed WindowMaker and started using it.
I forgot how amazing it was and how much it just work. Some customisations I do such as changing Caps to Control and other similar things were easy - just dealing with xinput/setxkbmap, etc.
So, my impression is that, for a while, things started getting simpler by having WYSIWYG editors and multiple things running at the same time in windows, but as the processing power and memory started improving, instead of making things easier and better, we (as people) started just adding more features and other things that they just made things more complicated than they should be.
Well, with all that, I wish success for you!
PS: It would be great if you had RSS support on your website.
Thanks! I don't actually know anything about how Ghost blogging platform interacts with RSS feeds, but I get a small amount of traffic from personal aggregation services. I guess I kind of thought RSS is enabled, but I don't use it so I honestly don't know. I'll look into it and see if there's some setting or toggle switch somewhere I need to flip.
The interface is optimized to let you quickly explore and tweak multiple tints/shades at once so you can customize all colors exactly how you want e.g. try dragging vertically through the saturation curve in one motion to edit all the tints/shades at once, or shift whole curves horizontally by dragging between the dots on a curve.
It uses the HSLuv color space, where (unlike say HSL) the WCAG contrast stays the same when you change the hue and saturation sliders. This makes it much easier to explore accessible colors choices as you know only changes to the lightness slider will impact the contrast. You can also switch from the WCAG2 contrast checker to using APCA, which is meant to correct for inaccuracies in WCAG2, such as it being too forgiving for dark mode color combos.
Note the mobile version is more of a preview and the desktop version has more features.
I probably need to add something like a tutorial as there's a lot going on, but I've added more hints and tooltips recently. Open to feedback on what's initially confusing and what changes might help!
I'd also keen to hear from people who are interested in accessibility but don't know much about it too. I've tried to explain the WCAG contrast rules in the simplest way I can (interactively, via the live mockup example on the right and contrast indicator icons that appear on the left) but there's quite a lot to cover.
Currently working on a take on Pokémon GO + Pokémon Snap but for birding. The goal is to explore your neighborhood, find birds, take good photos of them all. Next month, I'll be doing an event to find a rare bird, excited to see how it goes!
Not sure if this meets your criteria, yet iNaturalist [1] is kind of "gamified". Has a rather large "bird" taxon observation amount. 38,393,861 observations, 11,165 species, 1,130,700 observers, 188,988 identifiers (people who identify species from your pictures)
When Romania announced that the Lesser Kestrel had returned after 100 years iNaturalist actually had several of the observations in the nearby area. [2]
Do you have any plans to provide this data to ornithological research groups? I know there's an annual event where people across the nation are encouraged to count the birds in their back yards and report it, so it seems like this kind of amateur birdspotting is valued in the scientific community.
Nice work. I liked the instant pdf viewer. Kudos for your efforts.
Only thing I would suggest is, to support different tax formats (or provide an ability to fill custom tax format name that applies to the whole invoice). Right now, it is largely VAT. In some countries, it may not be relevant.
(Having said that, as a work around, currently anyone can use Notes field to fill custom tax details and hide all VAT related fields.)
I think by this point everyone that is learning a language knows that immersion is very important, however a problem I've had myself is that the content that interests me is beyond my reach, and the content that is within reach doesn't interest me.
This is my attempt at doing something to remediate that. You select the content you want, and I create a personalized study plan to learn the most important words to achieve a target % of understanding. Then I generate a short story each week for your particular level containing the new words in the context of your content.
The idea is to bring the content you want to learn to your level so you can watch what you want to watch.
I'm making Easel, a 2D game programming language designed to match how humans, not computers, think about game logic. It also has automatic multiplayer. I've been working on it for 3 years!
Easel feels like a declarative programming language even though it is imperative, because lots of useful game-oriented features are first class. Like behaviours - you just say `on Pointer { ... }` and you have a concurrently-executing coroutine that's lifetime is managed. But you don't think about any of that complexity, you just think of your entity as having a behaviour and go forth and make your game.
It also happens to have automatic multiplayer. Normally with multiplayer you have to worry about doing everything in a "multiplayer safe" way (i.e. be deterministic and only modify the things your side has authority over). My idea was to put all the multiplayer stuff in the programming language itself, underneath all your lines of code. This way, anything you write in that programming language can just be made multiplayer, automatically. So you can just pretend all your players are in one shared world, like a singleplayer game, and the engine does all the multiplayer for you. It was really difficult to make but it makes multiplayer so easy for you now.
Easel is my idea of how games should be made, or at least as close to the idea as I can achieve with 3 years of work, and I would love for more people to try it out.
> you can just pretend all your players are in one shared world, like a singleplayer game, and the engine does all the multiplayer for you
But how does this really work? The website also says it's just baked into the language but there are many different approaches to networking games that have their own pros and cons.
It uses rollback netcode. The inputs are relayed to the other players and executed on all clients, and they end up in the same state because all Easel programs are guaranteed deterministic. To hide latency, the clients simulate forward even before they have received all inputs, and once inputs have been received it rolls back to the point of divergence to correct the prediction error. This works because the prediction is correct most of the time.
To be able to roll back, Easel incrementally snapshots the game state every tick. It only snapshots (and restores) what has changed, which makes it a lot more efficient than most rollback netcode implementations.
It also uses a peer-to-peer relay and adapts the latency asymmetrically, so the player who introduces latency feels their own latency.
I know there are other models and pros and cons, this is the right choice for Easel because I wanted to make the multiplayer fully automatic. One shared world, coded like a singleplayer game. There are certainly games which suit a client/server model better but I think the developer would then need to understand where their code is running and when to do remote procedure calls, and my goal was to make multiplayer so easy that even a teenager on their first day of coding could do it.
I would love to hear more about what you were trying to do with your project before. Was it more similar to the declarative coding part, the automatic multiplayer part, or something else? Part of why I'm doing this is to explore the design space of how games should be made and I'm interested to hear what problems, issues, pet peeves, "bugbears" etc that other people think are worth solving.
I've been working on a 3D voxel-based game engine for like 10 years in my spare time. At this point it's getting pretty close to being shadertoy for voxels.
I also wrote a metaprogramming language which generates a lot of the editor UI for the engine. It's a bespoke C parser that supports a small subset of C++, which is exposed to the user through a 'scripting-like' language you embed directly in your source files. I wrote it as a replacement for C++ templates and in my completely unbiased opinion it is WAY better.
Fuck.. that's a hard question. I'm almost always trying to push at least one of three boundaries; voxel engine techniques, engine performance, my mechanical programming skill. Trying to push those boundaries, often in tandem or tridem, is always hard. Different jobs are often hard for different reasons, but overall it's been a difficult project for most of it's existence. That said, doing hard projects is what I enjoy, and it's a great feeling when you sit down to, for example, optimize something, and end up making it 20x faster!
> What motivated you to attempt creating this?
It started out as a learning exercise; a safe space where I could just 'fuck around and find out'. When I started, I never expected to spend nearly as much time on it as I have.
Readit News
https://tiledwords.com
It’s inspired by tile placement board games like Patchwork and crosswords. You rotate and move tiles to rebuild a broken crossword.
It’s free, web based, and responsive.
I currently have several hundred daily players and growing. My wife and I create the puzzles and I’m continuing to fix bugs and add new features.
I just launched a ”community puzzle” feature to let players help build new puzzles.
I’d love to know what you think!
I do a lot of NYT puzzle stuff every day and some other random puzzle sites before I get out of bed. That said, I'm over 40, love puzzles, love complicated board games, went through your brief explainer, and could not get a sensible handle on how to even start this thing. A new player has to really care about how to even try to begin to figure out whatever this is. I gave it about 20 seconds after the "how does it work?" Honestly, I gave up. I'm really not trying to rain on your parade. You might find a niche audience, and it'll be what you're going for, but I think you need a much, much better rules explainer if you want to be even remotely in the vicinity of a Wordle-level banger.
This thing might be really awesome, but not being able to figure out how to use it is a hard out for me.
I’m curious if there were specific aspects you struggled with or if the whole thing was confusing?
Did you try the Practice Puzzle or jump right into the daily?
Practice puzzle: https://tiledwords.com/puzzles/practice
It sounds like you read the instructions but they weren’t enough. Maybe a video explainer would be better? Does the gameplay recording on this Reddit post help at all?
https://www.reddit.com/r/DestroyMyGame/comments/1osxb2q/i_re...
People really seem to like it once it clicks (Over 1100 people have finished the daily puzzle so far today) but there is a steep learning curve and I’d love to learn how to help people get past that initial hump.
I want to explore a future feature where dropping a tile “pushes” other tiles out of the way that will hopefully make it feel less cramped
i wonder if have the clues point to a starting square (e.g., "E5") would be better than the current "reveal" aid. The spatial information would become more helpful toward the end when the player is dealing with the words they need help on.
I like that clue idea! I want to change how the reveals work. I’ll play with that!
Generating a custom sharing image is interesting!
(She finished today's puzzle, and I gave up.) From a UI perspective it is very slick - very smooth, and I like how it kind of "gets" what you were trying to do when providing corrections/hints.
there's a type of crossword called "diagramless" where you have the numbered clues and an empty grid
there was one in NYTimes Magazine Sunday puzzle page this past weekend
I found the instruction about double tapping a little confusing at first but figured it out as I played.
Nice work!
I solved the first puzzle: -Congratulations! -You solved Paprika with 18 slabs
But this was unclear: -You've solved 0 puzzles! -Reveal Rule -Next Puzzle -View Archive -You still have 2 guesses left. Finish guessing before revealing the rule if you're feeling brave!
I have to do 2 more guesses before I can reveal the rule that I already figured out?
This game was Show HNed two times in ten days, [1][2], but unfortunately, it didn't get as much attention as it should! Ironically, this current thread has already gained almost double the comments from both submissions combined!
I whish you best of luck to succeed in your journey.
___________________
1.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45750789
2.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45634525
Yeah I felt odd reposting the Show HN but I thought that the HN crowd would enjoy the game if a post got traction
The game design is really good too. It has just the right amount of juice.
On large screens adding more space would be a big quality of life improvement.
But it doesn’t really work on smaller screens.
So far I’ve tried to keep the experience as similar as possible across devices but maybe that’s silly
As a non native it feels awesome to finish a puzzle like this haha
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45750789
How do you market it – now or planning to, if I may ask?
I showcased at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo with the Portland Indie Game squad and that got me some players. I also shared it on my various personal social medias. The neighborhood board game store let me put up a poster!
I’m also hoping that organic sharing will drive growth.
This HN comment has been some of my most successful marketing so far. Around 2400 people from HN have visited since I posted!
I hope you make a success of this and sell it to the NYT for a disgusting amount of money.
This is a classic HN comment but I’d love a Thursday/Friday crossword difficulty equivalent in addition to the dailies which are a ~Monday.
I was getting a little bored of retrocomputing discourse being so centered on gaming, so I'm exploring the productivity software of the 8/16-bit era. I put real effort into learning and using the programs, giving my light-hearted but heartfelt assessment of its form and function for both its time and today.
Using the software inevitably gets me thinking about other things, and I explore those threads as well. For example, "Superbase on the C64" also discusses the legacy and promise of "the paperless office." A couple of other posts got some nice traction here on HN, notably "Deluxe Paint on the Amiga" and "VisiCalc on the Apple 2".
I'm hoping to build a strong monthly readership, so I'm putting in the work. It's been up for two months and five posts now, with a new one coming at the end of this week.
> There is utility in those old tools and interesting ideas to be mined. Recently I stumbled across something that by all accounts should have set the world on fire, but whose ideas needed more time to germinate before blossoming much later. Discoveries like this are not just nostalgic “what ifs” to opine wistfully upon, they can be dormant seeds of the future.
> Computing moves at such an unrelenting pace, those seeds may lie dormant for any number of reasons: bad marketing, released on a dying platform, too expensive, or even too large a mental leap for the public to “get” at the time. I see this blog as a way to explore the history of the work tools we use every day. I don’t do this out of misty-eyed sentimentality, but rather pragmatic curiosity. The past isn’t sacred, but it is still useful.
What's your research process? Do you use lots of Internet Archive material? Do you reference any personal artifacts i.e. old hardware or documentation laying around? Any interviewing?
My first job out of college was with a tiny, now-defunct company that built simple I/O hardware for 8-bit systems. One of the "side products" was a MacPaint clone for the Radio Shack Color Computer II called CoCoMax. We didn't write it: AFAIK, the programmer for the original version contacted the company and asked if they wanted to buy it and pay him royalties. He later went off and built an even more successful product used in TV stations called the Video Toaster. Side product or not, CoCoMax was a cash cow!
On the heels of that success, another programmer who'd written a more advanced version for the Color Computer 3 offered the same deal. From what I recall, they both made buttloads of money from their royalties.
Sometimes I wish I had kept some of that old hardware & software, but it's long gone.
So, my impression is that, for a while, things started getting simpler by having WYSIWYG editors and multiple things running at the same time in windows, but as the processing power and memory started improving, instead of making things easier and better, we (as people) started just adding more features and other things that they just made things more complicated than they should be.
Well, with all that, I wish success for you!
PS: It would be great if you had RSS support on your website.
https://www.inclusivecolors.com/
The interface is optimized to let you quickly explore and tweak multiple tints/shades at once so you can customize all colors exactly how you want e.g. try dragging vertically through the saturation curve in one motion to edit all the tints/shades at once, or shift whole curves horizontally by dragging between the dots on a curve.
It uses the HSLuv color space, where (unlike say HSL) the WCAG contrast stays the same when you change the hue and saturation sliders. This makes it much easier to explore accessible colors choices as you know only changes to the lightness slider will impact the contrast. You can also switch from the WCAG2 contrast checker to using APCA, which is meant to correct for inaccuracies in WCAG2, such as it being too forgiving for dark mode color combos.
Note the mobile version is more of a preview and the desktop version has more features.
I probably need to add something like a tutorial as there's a lot going on, but I've added more hints and tooltips recently. Open to feedback on what's initially confusing and what changes might help!
I'd also keen to hear from people who are interested in accessibility but don't know much about it too. I've tried to explain the WCAG contrast rules in the simplest way I can (interactively, via the live mockup example on the right and contrast indicator icons that appear on the left) but there's quite a lot to cover.
Deleted Comment
It's still a small closed alpha, if anyone is interested: https://testers.birdlego.com
Here is a rough trailer of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVpR8aafFjI
When Romania announced that the Lesser Kestrel had returned after 100 years iNaturalist actually had several of the observations in the nearby area. [2]
[1] https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?subview=map&taxon_i...
[2] https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?subview=map&taxon_i...
It’s basically a gamified version of Merlin. Would love any and all feedback!
Birdle Go seems really cool, very impressed and would love to test that!
Deleted Comment
- No sign-up, works entirely in-browser
- Live PDF preview + instant download
- VAT EU support
- Shareable invoice links
- Multi-language (10+) & multi-currency
- Multiple templates (incl. Stripe-style)
- Mobile-friendly
GitHub: https://github.com/VladSez/easy-invoice-pdf
Would love feedback, contributions, or ideas for other templates/features.
PS: e-invoice support coming soon
No signups, free for all, browser-only, live pdfs, etc
Built it for a friend and decided to share with all, it's just a react app (no backend) running on GCP and costs almost nothing to run.
Didn't think about opensourcing it and I will, why not.
Only thing I would suggest is, to support different tax formats (or provide an ability to fill custom tax format name that applies to the whole invoice). Right now, it is largely VAT. In some countries, it may not be relevant.
(Having said that, as a work around, currently anyone can use Notes field to fill custom tax details and hide all VAT related fields.)
UPD: Created an issue to investigate
https://github.com/VladSez/easy-invoice-pdf/issues/149
Deleted Comment
I think by this point everyone that is learning a language knows that immersion is very important, however a problem I've had myself is that the content that interests me is beyond my reach, and the content that is within reach doesn't interest me.
This is my attempt at doing something to remediate that. You select the content you want, and I create a personalized study plan to learn the most important words to achieve a target % of understanding. Then I generate a short story each week for your particular level containing the new words in the context of your content.
The idea is to bring the content you want to learn to your level so you can watch what you want to watch.
I'm making Easel, a 2D game programming language designed to match how humans, not computers, think about game logic. It also has automatic multiplayer. I've been working on it for 3 years!
Easel feels like a declarative programming language even though it is imperative, because lots of useful game-oriented features are first class. Like behaviours - you just say `on Pointer { ... }` and you have a concurrently-executing coroutine that's lifetime is managed. But you don't think about any of that complexity, you just think of your entity as having a behaviour and go forth and make your game.
It also happens to have automatic multiplayer. Normally with multiplayer you have to worry about doing everything in a "multiplayer safe" way (i.e. be deterministic and only modify the things your side has authority over). My idea was to put all the multiplayer stuff in the programming language itself, underneath all your lines of code. This way, anything you write in that programming language can just be made multiplayer, automatically. So you can just pretend all your players are in one shared world, like a singleplayer game, and the engine does all the multiplayer for you. It was really difficult to make but it makes multiplayer so easy for you now.
Easel is my idea of how games should be made, or at least as close to the idea as I can achieve with 3 years of work, and I would love for more people to try it out.
But how does this really work? The website also says it's just baked into the language but there are many different approaches to networking games that have their own pros and cons.
To be able to roll back, Easel incrementally snapshots the game state every tick. It only snapshots (and restores) what has changed, which makes it a lot more efficient than most rollback netcode implementations.
It also uses a peer-to-peer relay and adapts the latency asymmetrically, so the player who introduces latency feels their own latency.
I know there are other models and pros and cons, this is the right choice for Easel because I wanted to make the multiplayer fully automatic. One shared world, coded like a singleplayer game. There are certainly games which suit a client/server model better but I think the developer would then need to understand where their code is running and when to do remote procedure calls, and my goal was to make multiplayer so easy that even a teenager on their first day of coding could do it.
I tried doing something much more rudimentary before. Will be following
I would love to hear more about what you were trying to do with your project before. Was it more similar to the declarative coding part, the automatic multiplayer part, or something else? Part of why I'm doing this is to explore the design space of how games should be made and I'm interested to hear what problems, issues, pet peeves, "bugbears" etc that other people think are worth solving.
https://github.com/scallyw4g/bonsai
I recently ported the terrain generators to the GPU, and increased the visible volume to 1 billion voxels cubed. I did a short YouTube video about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLfgjWsM1PI
I also wrote a metaprogramming language which generates a lot of the editor UI for the engine. It's a bespoke C parser that supports a small subset of C++, which is exposed to the user through a 'scripting-like' language you embed directly in your source files. I wrote it as a replacement for C++ templates and in my completely unbiased opinion it is WAY better.
https://github.com/scallyw4g/poof
Stoked to have another user!
> What was the hardest part of this project?
Fuck.. that's a hard question. I'm almost always trying to push at least one of three boundaries; voxel engine techniques, engine performance, my mechanical programming skill. Trying to push those boundaries, often in tandem or tridem, is always hard. Different jobs are often hard for different reasons, but overall it's been a difficult project for most of it's existence. That said, doing hard projects is what I enjoy, and it's a great feeling when you sit down to, for example, optimize something, and end up making it 20x faster!
> What motivated you to attempt creating this?
It started out as a learning exercise; a safe space where I could just 'fuck around and find out'. When I started, I never expected to spend nearly as much time on it as I have.