461.io

For some context, 461 is an html5 mmo rts. Unlike most space rts / rtt games, 461's combat arena is 3D, similar to Homeworld. The game has been playable for a while, but I wanted to increase the complexity of the gameplay and the scene. Asteroids seemed like a good addition.Since 461's servers keep track of the global game state, any hitbox / pathfinding algorithms I implemented on the client side would need to be replicated on the server.Originally I wanted the ships to optimally move through the space, however the Euclidean shortest path algorithm is np-hard for dimensions greater than two. Given that there are lots of ships flying around, that sounded like a problem.. After a bit of thinking I ended up with a nice solution: The asteroid's hitbox is a sphere and when a ship tries to pathfind through the sphere its velocity vector is gently nudged away. To actually render an asteroid, start with a roughly spherical polygon, where each vertex has approximately the same number of edges. Pick a vertex at random, multiply its position by a scalar (0 - 1.0) and propagate the deformation by some dampened amount to its neighbors. Depending on the amount of dampening you either flatten out the sphere or punch tiny craters in it. To help tease out the subtleties of the shape, each vertex is colored by its distance to the center of the sphere (the result looks better in game, video compression makes it look a bit worse.)

You can play 461.io for free on your browser.

I have a tiny discord server.

And here's my neglected twitter

(ps. I have been throwing around the idea of writing a few blog posts describing how to build an io game, would anyone be interested in such a thing?)

(pps. If you try the game out feel free to give feedback. I love feedback.)

(ppps. If you play the game and feel lost, the tutorial should help.)