This is an infinite browser-based mmo universe where everything can be drawn and placed into the world, wiki-style... give us a shout if you need anything! You can also script blocks to have interaction or influence the environment (for instance, here's an adventure: http://manyland.com/newpolis ).
This is beautiful and I love it. I think the 8-bit graphics are definitely appealing to early generation gamers like myself. I don't know if it's my personal bias, but I think the cartoonish simplicity makes it more endearing.
I started a game, found a unicorn, flew up to a spaceship, flew up to a tiny, floating, green block. When I got out of the spaceship, it flew away! This stranded me on the block. Now I see no way to reset my character, and there is nothing to do but die.
I'm sure this is a fun game, but I only got 4 minutes in before it became totally unplayable. :(
Sorry for this! Could you please try running it in a smaller window and see if that helps? If not, could you pls try using Firefox for a quick comparison? If that also doesn't work, please email us at we@manyland.com so we can look at it together.
In open areas yes, though please don't :) it's a very open world relying on each of us to do good. (Destructions of established blocks will leave dust that is traced back to you, and allows the undoing of the removal.) You can make a new area though where you can set the permission to you/ you and your friends only, meaning someone won't be able to remove a block there. Created areas with such permissions have another benefit: even your friends can enjoy them as explorers, trying to solve quest puzzles and such. I've made one such area here, for instance, an adventure game: http://manyland.com/newpolis
If something is placed over it, you can then remove the new block to show the old dust again, so you can undo even then. Dust only shows if the old block is considered established, which looks at ranking and time it was placed. The undo system kind of evolved over time...
Saw this posted over on PH and checked it out, extremely impressive game and I'm sure there's a ton of dev time on this. Good job and props to the creators.
I wanted to notify you guys though of some security flaws within the game.
Probably the biggest issue I see is the lack of server side checks against changes coming from the client. I only tested this out on the player object as a PoC, but it only takes changing a variable within the player object to modify things like player speed, mountable craft speed, etc.
For instance, while you obfuscated the name of the player object within the ig.game object, it was easily found by checking for modifications to the health variable, where another function listed it as ig.game.O1376. This name for this player object is also static for every game instance, so it's easily referred to every time.
Once the player object was found, it's easy to modify the variables and the world (server side) accepts it. It was also easy, for the most part, to identify what certain variables did as they were in plain text. To change player jump height for example, all it would take is this piece of JavaScript:
Now the player can super jump and the server is fine with it (verified by numerous 'holy sh!' and 'wtf!?' comments from other players).
The second thing I see is just obfuscating the code more.
I would suggest first and foremost to do the server side checks. Even if you left all your code in plain text, any modification someone tried to make from the client would be seen, verified, and handled accordingly by the server. Second I would try obfuscating all variable names that you can, especially the class definitions like EntityPlayer. To go further on it, I would have it produce the obfuscated names randomly on each load of the game script so they're not easily referred to.
Just wanted to bring the issue up to you guys after finding it.
Thanks for these details! We added a client-side scripting option to specifically increase your jumps, so if you want you can create an Interacting for that. We also added flying mountables, triple jump wearables, parachutes, insta-teleporting, a 100% invincibility armor, and everything one might want to do. When you have a need, we try if possible to make it a feature, by integrating it in the Interacting language. At rank 2, try creating an Interacting block to see some of the things you can do. (If people find someone doing something which somehow ruins things for them, they may flag report a person though.)
Now as far as tweaking things which are harmful to others go, we try to base it on friendship -- so e.g. if you pick up a weapon you can only harm people who friended you (if your friends disagree with being killed, they can unfriend, and unfriended people aren't affected by one's bullets) -- but if you find anything that harms others even when not friended, please give us some time to fix it and disclose it privately to: we@manyland.com (we do have server-side checks for such things, so if something is not working there, we'd really appreciate the tip) We aren't perfect and private disclosure is very much appreciated.
Thanks again! Please let us know via email please if you find anything!
No problem, and yeah I only tested simple player vars like jumping, nothing harm wise that would affect other players. Doing the server side check on that is perfect though, so it's obv you guys are aware of it (thought as much given the level of code).
I'll definitely let you know if I find anything else, was just messing with it for an hour or so today :) I apologize too if you don't want this up here and let me know if you want me to delete it.
Looks like you trust the client on their window.ig.game.O722.rank, which allows people to remove blocks at the center and trap people. Check area 2, I think.
You are right, sorry for that and thanks for the reminder. We just recently changed that conceptually and haven't fully synced it -- for the first year, everyone at any rank was able to edit anywhere in area 1 - 4, even in center. We'll look at it soon, was quite a big wave tonight!
I thought "what a nice wind sound effect" until I realized it was the CPU fan in my laptop. Heh. But that's not really a big deal, at least for now, and I'm sure you can optimize.
Experiments like this show us that graphics and VFX are overrated. It's true for games, and it's true for movies too. Primer is still one of the best sci-fi flicks I've seen in the last ten years, and they used what looked like surplus air conditioning equipment as props. Sometimes too much FX actually gets in the way of your imagination. When I visit a virtual world, I kind of want it to be unlike the physical.
I tried a Rift the other day too, and that has its appeal as well. But it's a different appeal.
Noticed it was a tad laggy and then tracerouted and found that it's in London and I'm in Southern California. I suppose that's understandable. I guess if things take off you'd be able to geo-locate a bit via other cloud services.
> I thought "what a nice wind sound effect" until I realized it was the CPU fan in my laptop.
hehe... can I say we totally planned for that...
(sorry though! if you were around green mountain, that's actually our busiest area. Hope you stick around with us, and let us know how the upranking to 5 goes, it should be smooth over the coming days, and then you can do everything in the world.)
Am I the only person who has no idea what's going on here? I'm just walking around picking up stuff and sometimes changing into something else. What else is there to do in this world? Besides building more stuff to wear or throw around that is...
This is fantastic, though I seem to be falling to my death fairly regularly, loading to interlude screen and then clicking to get back. Are there going to be consequences for dying? If not why have the interlude?
Also the falling to death kicks in much faster than I would have expected.
Looks interesting, but it's laggy as hell. Running latest Firefox on a beefy hardware. Got booted off twice already with "you have performance issues" and a suggestion to switch to Chrome (haha). Just FYI.
Sorry for that! Can you please try this area and see if it's better? http://manyland.com/7 There's also some arrow signs leading you to further portals
Absolutely! I loved Compuserve's Worlds Away back in the 1990s, it's rooted in Habitat, and it was a big inspiration for Manyland. I've never seen Habitat except in trailers, and it looks absolutely amazing... like much else of what Lucasfilm did.
How many lines of code of each, how many people, how much work on which parts?
I dunno why, because I'm certain I've seen games like this somewhere, but this just seems really cool and sorta inspiring, along the lines of "hey, you can just write code and toss it in a browser and go". (Not to be rude; I'm sure it took a lot of effort.) This is one of the first times I've ever felt this way. Ever since '95, I've never been impressed with a web version of something, because usually it's a weak imitation of a native program. But this just feels like something different.
We're a great community and 2 developers. A lot of work goes into the details (we must have spent over a day just tuning the jump, or the way chat words are floating and such, not to mention the whole architecture Scott has set up), as well as to adjust to what the community is asking for, and new needs we see. It won't surprise you that a lot of the work goes into making things mmo-compatible.
JavaScript/ html5 has pros and cons but one thing that is fun is to be able to quickly release updates, sometimes several times over the course of a day, which will then instantly be visible to everyone in the world (and since we're using a browser wrapper for e.g. the iPad version, it will also be updated across devices).
One thing we pondered might be cool for the future is some kind of iframe-sandboxed JavaScript to add object functionality, but already you can add to the functionality using behavior scripts called Interactings. http://manyland.com/info-interacting This is the way you can currently extend the logic, and we're setting most of our Interactings for tutorial purposes and such to 'clonable', meaning you can collect the object and adjust and copy its graphic & code. Take a look at some of the videos on the Interacting help page to get an idea, and please contact us if you have any questions or suggestions!
It's also not closed in the sense that you cannot hack the hell out of it once you buy a license. The closed part is just so that Dom gets his 99$ license fees (IMO a steal).
Very cool. How is input sent to the server? Is it one packet when you press the button down and one packet when you release or constinuously sending packets while you hold the button down?
I haven't figured out how to use it yet, but the 2D editor I saw in a video that showed up when I sat on a bench was really cool. Efficient editing of the world around you is a really neat feature to have. I think the Starbound devs have an external tool to do that sort of thing, but having it internal is even better.
Very cool, but the big test will be how this game handles the inevitable 4chan/something awful/reddit effect with masses and masses of genitalia on screen.
I've seen similar collaborative sites ruined by the above.
This might not break the game but in large enough doses turn off large groups of users.
Pretty cool, reminds me of games like Furcadia and Graal.
In Furcadia, you're allowed to create and upload your own world with your own scripts, as well as upload your own images and avatars for use in the world.
Graal has player worlds and allows almost the same thing.
[co dev here] Interesting you mention this. When we saw Glitch closing, while we never had a chance to try it, we did see the amazing community spirit of the Glitchens. For our earliest launch, we invited Glitchens to give Manyland a try, and they built the very first blocks!
Thank you! Early on, we decided not to include an asset import tool - there were a number of factors, but mainly we wanted to nurture the in-game creativity, and keep a level playing field. We will keep an open mind regarding future direction though!
We have the Android version ready, but we are waiting for one final feature: the ability to target Android 4.4.3+ specifically (as it's the first with Canvas hardware acceleration built in the web view, which we need).
Kindle Fire HDX on the other hand, we released through their 'html app' option, meaning we can actually point to manyland.com and don't need to provide a compiled project. Pretty neat from Amazon!
Oops. Can you please click this link? It points to green mountain center: http://manyland.com/3 (once you log in you can also make snapshots to later teleport to, or teleport with the map)
HN is not built to allow downvoting of threads; only posts. If there is a problem with the article it can be flagged for review by the moderators. In this case I think your best bet is to simply not upvote it.
[Other dev] You can use firefox, but chrome seems to run the game a bit faster. Some of the busy areas have a massive amount of stuff in them, so you might want to try some that are a bit more lightweight (e.g. try manyland.com/5). We are working on improving client performance, so this will get better over time!
It does look a lot like Habbo. I've never actually played Habbo, but I know about it because I track phishing scams. Phishing scams for "Habbo coins" were popular a few years ago. (The good old days, when attacks came from kids in their parents basement, not major intelligence services.)
Is there a reason why we often have shitty nondescriptive titles like this? I almost always have to click on every link on the frontpage because it is impossible to predict if I might be interested in the article/webpage behind the title or not :(
Back in "the day" the rules said you couldn't go crazy with editorializing the title, but could improve it so it made sense. That rule disappeared from the guidelines about a year ago(?) and HN seemed to go to a strict "title must be verbatim" approach for a bit.
Now it seems the approach is that mods/people who run HN are the ones who usually improve titles, which I think is a good idea (Techmeme does this), although it's often not for some time after they hit front page too, sadly. Maybe they can give a more official explanation of the policy though.
We need hnify.com, a service to let a user give a title and brief summary for a website, and autocreate a web page with that title/info, for submission to HN.
