SP. IX

Yet another Minecraft-inspired experiment, in the browser. Online multiplayer (desktop / mobile) support, portals, cubic world, terrain generation and more.

Demo available here!

Features

For players:

• Terrain generation: perlin noise (default) + initial support for voronoi-based fantasy map generation
• Day and night cycles
• Browser support: Chrome+Firefox+Edge
• Multiplayer support
• Player collision
• Infinite world in all directions
• 40+ different blocks
• (Experimental) Mobile support: Firefox
• (Experimental) Cubic world
• (Experimental) Real-time portals to other worlds
• (Experimental) Water reflection, shadows, and too much bloom
• No installation, you just need a browser!

For developers:

• Fast prototyping platform with Webpack
• 100% Javascript (NodeJS + client)
• Default option to bundle the server code within the client
• Netcode: client-server lockstep model with interpolation
• Netcode: bindings for SocketIO and WebRTC
• Build tasks with Gulp
• Testing (Mocha, Karma, coverage)

Hopefully this project can serve as a starting point for your custom SocketIO/WebRTC game!

Parallel worlds	Cubic world

Shadow volume	Shadow map

Night cycle; arrow trail	Advanced generation

Entity collision	Mobile

Walking on the edge	Portal gun

Missing features

This is an experiment! Before it can be considered playable, some important features are missing:

• Audio
• Persistent world
• Cave generation with an appropriate lighting model
• Crafting system
• Content (mob meshes, behaviors, items)

Demo

1. Go to https://madblade.github.io/spix/

2. Click on I want to play at once under Solo mode to start a local server.

3. Click on Click to play to bind the mouse cursor.

4. Controls:

• mouse or right stick to look around
• WASD/arrow keys or left stick to move, spacebar or circle to jump
• mouse wheel/page up/page down or dpad left/dpad right to select the current item
• left-click or cross to dig a block / use the current item
• right-click or square to add a block
• shift to sprint on desktop

Note on the portal gun:

• Only portals to other worlds supported
• Clicking on a block while holding the portal gun will spawn a portal perpendicular to it

Development

Requirements:

• git (available here for Windows)
• node + npm (available here)
• (recommended) PowerShell for Windows or a Unix system

Installation:

git clone https://github.com/madblade/spix
cd spix
npm install

Dev Build:

npm run-script dev

• Rebuilds are automatic!
• Modify a client file, and Webpack rebuilds the client in 1-2s
• Modify a server file, and node rebuilds the server in 8-9s

To save server build time, set LOCALSERVER to false in sever/config/express; now Webpack should rebuild the server in 5-6s.

(but then you can only use sockets! to debug the server code, you then need to start the gulp serve:debug in debug mode)

Server deployment

The easiest way to get the project running for multiplayer is to build a socket server.

Install the project (cf. Development.) and optionally specify the port you want in server/config/environment/production. There you may specify the IP (changle localhost to :: for ipv6).

Then, run:

npm run-script build

The build should take ~20s to complete. Be sure to specify a base in the generated index.html.

Then you can start a node instance with:

npm run-script prod

Clients may then connect with a browser to the deployed application.

Contribution

This is a “for fun” project, but anyone is welcome to contribute.

Here are some minimal guidelines in case you want to do so:

• Make sure your PR addresses a specific issue (or be so kind as to open an issue before you start working on it)

• Make sure you properly run lints with gulp lint:scripts

• Make sure the changes do not introduce performance issues (e.g. using the Chrome profiler)

• Make sure you do not commit third-party code that’s not open-source

• Ideally, write server/client tests and check the coverage:

  gulp test

  gulp coverage:server