HTML5 Netrek Lite

[Zachary Uram]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Andrew Sillers <apsi...@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 10:33 PM
Subject: HTML5 Netrek Lite


Hello all,

I've been hard at work on the HTML5 Netrek client, online at
http://trekproxy.nodester.com (and source at
https://github.com/apsillers/html5-netrek). I have made massive
improvements to the game's performance and usability (indeed, while I
was testing on Continuum, I found myself playing several full rounds
of pre-T). Since my last update in April, I have added:

- login screen with server selection
- speed indicator (settable with mouse, too -- I was hoping to make
this playable on a tablet someday)
- engine temp indicator
- cloaking
- repair/fuel/army planet indicators
- phasers (visually a little messy, but they're there)
- defensive torp detonation
- incoming chat (no outgoing yet; not pretty)
- army transport (untested, but I think it should work)

When you try it out, know that sometimes the outfitting screen does
not work and you need to refresh the page. This happens very rarely,
and I am working on a fix. There's also a "bug" where you get ghost
busted after 20-30 seconds of inactivity, which will disappear as soon
as I get pings working.

But enough about present. Let's talk about THE FUTURE:

Sadly, I must focus my attention to other projects and cannot continue
regular development on the client (until at least next year,
probably). There's a lot of work to do before this can be a
fully-fledged client (explosion animations, tractors, pressors, key
mapping, alliances, to name a few) but I think this client could be a
kind of "Netrek Lite" that new prospective players could play
in-browser, to sample the game without having to download and install
a native client application.

My question to all of you is: what's the best way to go about it? I
don't have time to integrate a dynamic tutorial into the game, but I
could make an on-page static tutorial ("Once you set course back
toward Earth, go to the next lesson...") with paged, incremental
lessons. The main question is whether to use a separate server for
learning (a quiet server is good for learning to drive, but not
combat; a hot server might keep you from following the tutorial due to
unexpected combat).

Similarly, what functionality is missing right now that you feel is
*critical* to learning to play and/or keeping a prospective player
interested? I can give this project a few more solid hours of effort,
so please let me know how I should spend them. For example, I could
probably implement tractors and pressors, or I could clean up the
phaser animation, or I could ensure chat works cleanly, but I can only
do so much. I need some discussion of what you think is most
important. Rearranging and resizing the elements on the screen (world,
galactic, chat) is easiest (and probably most important, since right
now the chat is very awkwardly placed) -- that would take only a
matter of minutes, once I decided where to place everything.

Finally, if I am going to use a static tutorial, I need someone to
either 1) draft out the tutorial text, or at least 2) propose a lesson
plan that I could flesh out into a set of tutorial pages.

What say you, mailing list?

--Andrew

P.S. I've only really tested the client on Ubuntu Firefox, so let me
know if you find any big browser compatibility bugs. If your browser
supports canvas and Websockets (and even those are technically
optional) and you find a problem, let me know.


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