Forums » Games » Multiplayer tanks

This is a multi player game I'm been working on - the server is Erlang.
It's still a bit of a tech demo and might seem a bit laggy but it's getting there.

http://tankdeathmatch.co.uk/

probably worth mentioning you need a browser that supports websockets - so a newish Firefox or chrome i guess.

My co-worker and I just tried it out. We were lighting each other up but no one ever dies. Also, I found I could run into my dud shells and It would bring me to a halt. Great progress though!

Yeah, it registers hits but doesn't do anything with them yet.

You might have been driving into the invisible barrier that's around the game map, collision is turned off between shells and their in game owner.

Very cool. The background textures are quite nice. Do you know who did them or where they came from?

They're from Lost Garden

I believe they're covered by a creative commons 3 license.

Tried it with chrome. One thing I've noticed is the turret motion is pretty fast but when I tried to move, or fire, it's too laggy.

One of the recent things I've been working on is client side prediction to smooth out the frame rate that server was in Texas I think so latency was screwing it if your in Europe etc :)
I put a recent version on an Amazon ec2 instance in Ireland (closer to me) and updated the link at the top.

Done quite a few updates to it if anyone would like to add some feedback.

Client side prediction isn't quite there which causes a few anomalies (Juddering, things glide into the screen instead of appearing)

Its a bit dull if no one else is playing.

It's fun but it lags a lot still. Also you should have the damaged tanks removed from the game/disappear in a certain amount of time? Also, why are bullets being ricocheted?

Maybe add health bars at the top of the tanks for everyone to see?

The dead tanks should disappear after 5 mins - timeout might be a bit high :)
Lag should be a better now, my client side prediction calc was slightly wrong.
Nice idea with the health bars, I'll add them in.

That was fun :)

5 minutes seems a bit steep indeed for dead tanks. Do you get connected to a random other player? What happens if no other players connect? Is there an AI tank?

There's only 1 persistent battleground, if no one else is connected you're just on your own.
In theory you could have hundreds of people on it at the same time but I've only tested up to 25.

There's AI static bunkers that just shoot at whoever is closest.
I'm updating it so whenever a bunker is destroyed a power up appears randomly on the map. I've got about 10 different power ups ready.

Might work on creating some AI bot tanks.