There has been a dedicated community of thousands of players, many of which have been playing well over a decade. Plenty of videos on youtube under either "Subspace" or more recently "Continuum".
I wasted so much of my life on this game around 1999-ish. I think one year I looked at my play time and about a third of my waking hours were spent playing.
Got the CTO of the startup I was working at into this game. One day his wife came in and saw me playing and said "Oh, you play this too." And I told her "Yeah, I was the person who introduced So-and-so to it." She hissed out "That was YOU?!" and walked away real fast. Never spoke to me again.
Amazing game - I spent several years in the early 2000s playing a spinoff called Infantry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infantry_(video_game). Sony ran it into the ground and I wound up trying SubSpace since it was supposedly the predecessor and had the same engine, but never got into it.
While typing this up I discovered Infantry is actually still alive, resurrected by some diehards on free player-maintained servers! Can't imagine that happening for any of today's games in twenty years. It's probably just nostalgia, but to me the early 2000s were a special golden age of PC gaming and community that will never be topped.
Definitely one of my favorite games of all time! I liked the server that had the economic model with all the different kinds of guns, shields, and armors it was super fun.
Extreme Games is my favorite (large CTF game with a bunch of different bases). Unfortunately it wasn't one of the default zones on the client last I checked and you had to go into the client's server view to add it. Really is one of the best zones. Much more interesting than Trench Wars.
If anybody played Infantry, the EOL zone was based on Extreme Games. Though it would blow my mind if anyone knows what I'm talking about.
EGFL has created some of the tensest gaming experiences in decades with teammates from across the globe. Regular 8 or 9 hour games that were hotly contested.
Lag-attaching as a strategy is an incredible example of how innovative gamers were given latency restraints. :) Shout out to Explosive, my first EG Squad.
I dont remember that many drawn out games in EGFL. Longest one i know of was imp vs mut, which was 12+ hours long. Lag attaching was a dirty bug which just added fun :)
Wow that takes me back. Some incredibly thrilling gaming moments with large numbers of people that climaxed after sometimes literal hours of back and forth.
I was in one of the better clans at the time and the sheer skill of some of those players was astounding.
Since www.rshl.org doesn't appear to be loading here, could you give me an ELI5 on how this differs from Trench Wars (which I still play periodically having owned a copy of Subspace itself) ?
Hockey Zone creatively shortens the bullet lengths for ships and decreases the respawn timer to simulate a hockey check. A powerball serves as the puck, and there is both public games (effectively pickup in recreational sports nomenclature) and a 20+ year running league.
Technically Hockey Zone runs on something called ASSS (a small subspace server) which enables significantly more advanced features than the base client such as instant replay and dynamic scoreboard overlays.
That's fascinating and something I should definitely try one day - I doubt it'll replace Trench Wars in my heart but I bet I'll really enjoy experimenting for a bit.
Can I ask what the compelling gameplay is of this game, where people spend thousands of hours on it? From a distance it doesn't seem like e.g. a bit persistent world, but more of an arena, short one-off games kinda thing; I find it hard to comprehend you could spend thousands of hours on that.
I spent a summer there. Even playing solo free for all it was so much fun being the top scorer in a zone, having that little trophy next to your ship, and having people hunt you or get blasted. The ships vary, but there's a fast fighter that can one shot kill most things if you are a very good shot, and zoom by other ships on after burners with a little spin, dodging the return fire. That ship can also put a bullet through the openings in walls and bases and sometimes take out a defender. Even spending an entire summer at it, I wasn't the best shot by a long shot.
That's just my experience as well. There are many other types of ships like bombers with big explosive, slow shots with blast effect, and other ships that can have other players attach to them as turrets. If your team in the arena can escort a bomber safely to a base with some fighters, you can often nuke the enemy right through the walls and capture the flag there. Meanwhile if you are just piloting a fighter it's a big win to take out one of the turret ships. Then there's other ships like ones that can cloak and fire sneak attacks, etc..
I'd say that SubSpace and its predecessors were the first "haiku-competitives" -- a lineage that eventually resulted in DotA and League of Legends.
Essentially: distill gameplay to a relatively small number of rules + iterate balance until it's incredibly finely tuned + let the playerbase go nuts with whatever strategies they can come up with.
The attraction being that they're easy to pick up (few rules to learn) but incredibly deep (complex interactions and strategies).
Coupled with the fact that circa-late-90s, the idea of an MMO was still mind blowing. Games with friends and strangers?!
From memory, SubSpace also had a fairly addictive loot mechanic (tiered materials, item construction, randomly timed rare enemy spawns).
I remember playing one called Gravitron maybe on my old PC. The kind you launch from the DOS prompt. You have to navigate planetary terrain and defense systems while you're ship is in constant free fall, so you give tiny controlled thrusts to keep from crashing and slide left and right.
I remember this was the promo game on pepsi.com for a week (I believe I was busy collecting pepsi points for a Harrier jet at the time) and I ended up spending thousands of hours on it. Fantastic game - can't believe how well it worked on 56k.
- Never keep any controls pressed down. Consider each single keypress as a discrete action that consumes energy. The more conservative you are with keypresses, the more energy you keep.
- Because it's busy, you have to accelerate right after spawning, otherwise you're in the hellzone and people will actually spawn inside you, causing instant death.
- The down arrow will brake/stop your ship, no matter which direction you're pointing. This is handy when you approach the edge of the map.
- Try cruising along the edge of the map at a leisurely pace, avoid the center, and pwn slowly.
I figured. Game registers a single keypress as multiple (Firefox / macOS). Keypresses register late (I can notice this especially with brake). Nearly unplayable for me.
Same here, even when I'm alone in the arena. Unplayable. Feel like the packet has to go to the server and back before I see a response in my local craft.
Edit:
Pinging 13 times I got: rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 125.981/217.330/322.054/63.585 ms
>200ms ping average, 64ms median deviation, yeah I bet the packets have to go to the server before it responds and that explains everything. The weird thing is that it was still an issue while I was alone on the server so it can't have been overloaded.
To my own website that's 37.490/39.462/41.610/1.199 ms, so it's not my connection.
I experienced an "interesting" glitch where the world appeared to rapidly switch back and forth between two diverging states. Almost as if two different servers were continuously updating me with their different opinions of what's going on.
This all went down while I was on vacation so have limited access. Plan to make some play through videos when I get home. You can follow my progress at: blog.spacefrigates.com or twitter: @spacefrigates
Thank you, much appreciated! I'm just starting out and have lots of plans. Follow my progress on my blog: blog.spacefrigates.com or follow the game on twitter: @spacefrigates
Was about to suggest that myself (but searched and found you already had). I've not looked in recently so I don't know how much development is going on, but I wasted many a bit of time playing this and its variants with a group of friends while at Uni two decades ago.
Key-words for those searching: cross-platform, open source, multi-player, fun.
Heh, yes. It played WAY WAY WAY smoother in the late 80s than space frigates plays on my 3+ GHz desktop.
At the time netrek was near unplayable on my 386. But I got the optional 387 FPU and a S3-801 (that had hardware support for vectors) and suddenly netrek, xpilot, and similar vector games played great.
Wanting something to be good and usable based on its name being exciting to you isn’t the same as it actually being good or usable. It’s astonishing that this was upvoted by 179 people. There are already hundreds of multiplayer .io browser games that are actually playable. Some of them are space games, microgravity.io for instance.
Why is no one giving their honest opinion on Space Frigates, which can only possibly be negative? I suppose there is a culture of fear in HN comment sections, people are afraid of pointing out when something is obvious amateur hour garbage because they don’t want to get spanked with downvotes or a shadowban for hurting someone’s feelings. Is this really necessary? Why protect someone’s feelings? Sometimes people need to hear what they don’t really want to hear, otherwise you’re just enabling their delusion and they never improve themselves.
I love this. This reminds me a lot of my first experience with teeworlds[1], which came pre-installed with LXLE (a sort of hipster Lubuntu derivative). In both cases my emotions transitioned from "oh, another one of these games", to delight as I realized the ships around me were controlled by other players, to being thoroughly amused by the wonky physics. I love lightweight games where it's super low friction to launch, interact with other players, and sign off.
This brings back unpleasant reminders of my early gaming days, my middle gaming days and my later gaming days, in which I am sitting at the controls struggling to move in a voluntary manner. Fortunately there are other folk there who are kind enough to put me out of my misery, speedily.
I like the conservation of angular momentum, a nod to physics realism relatively uncommon in classic space shooters. The "brakes" (down arrow key) seem like they should follow the same rules, though, that you should start moving backward if you fire them too much.
Can you be honest, did this actually make the game more fun to you? And why should a pilot, whether in a game or in real space, need to think about conservation of angular momentum when computers can very easily handle that themselves and perform the calculations necessary to emulate simple steering instead?
Counterintuitively that's actually not realistic. Distances and velocities in space are so large that the thrust required to change a spacecraft's orientation and angular velocity to essentially any desired value will always be completely trivial compared to the thrust it needs to go anywhere.
Linking turn to fire makes the game no fun. I kind of like the idea of limited resources, but this makes all the ships degenerate into spinning drifters that occasionally in a spread. There's no skill at that point.
Yep, when ships explode they drop debris which can be picked up for energy. How much energy you get depends on how much energy the ship had when they exploded.
Computers can take input and handle it however the programmer wants in order to replicate ordinary steering. This is true in both games and in actual space.
Why is everyone in this comment section seemingly unable to say anything negative about Space Frigates? This deserves its own 2 hour documentary.
I’m tempted to submit a random .io game and see how people react.
Yes, you are correct. In fact, this has been something I have gone back on forth on myself.
I do actually have an “on board computer” That sits between what the player tried to do and what the ship actually does.
For example, the on board computer will only allow the pilot to fire the rotational thrusters to a certain max angular momentum.
I’ve also experimented with having the on board computer automatically stop rotation by firing the opposite rotational thruster for the pilot automatically.
The thing is, it was a pain because whatever we that degree turn was was never just right.
So, when you tried to fire at another ship you would often rotate a little too much or a little not enough.
Having it the way it is now we’re the pilot has to manually control angular velocity gives the. More precise control.
So that is why that is the way it currently is. But, many people have had the same feedback...
What I am thinking about doing is having a control on the HUD where pilots can choose manual versus automatic and also set the amount of predefined degree of rotation they want when in automatic.
My issue is just "I'm not going to spend the time to figure this out." I know how to use vim, I know how to drive a manual transmission car, I learned those things, it is possible.
But if you ask me to apply even a fraction of the effort spent learning vim or stick shift to learning a lo-fi space shooter, my question is "why" and my answer is "no thanks." It's not that it's impossible, it's that the juice is not worth the squeeze, at least for me.
I admit that the controls are not intuitive for somebody who has never played the game.
I do enjoy the controls and find that they make the game very challenging but I do understand that it will drive away many potential players.
I think that the "why" will eventually be that there will be a lot more content. My long term visual is to grow the game into more than a simple shooter. I eventually plan to have larger ships with more components to control.
I hope that as the game progresses the content will justify more of a learning curve. For example, many people have taken the time to learn Dwarf Fortress because it is an awesome game with tons of content.
But I'm a long, long way from that.
So, to your point, I may need to make the controls more intuitive until the content justifies a larger learning curve.
I’m using the Meteor JS full stack framework as the base framework.
Really convenient for an app like this where parts of the code, like the game engine, need to run on the client and server and be identical.
Of course, you could do the same thing with node and web sockets yourself but Meteor JS made it easier for me to get started.
I’m not currently using any client side framework like React or Vue (although both work great in Meteor JS) because I render everything client side in the Canvas tag.
In the future, will probably be moving to the Lance real time JS engine and Pixie for WebGL tendering.
It’s unplayable and barely functional. Do you actually like it, or you just like the idea of what it could be?
There has been a multiplayer websocket .io game renaissance ongoing since 2016. Hundreds of multiplayer websocket games have been released in that time and they’re all objectively better than this, tech stack included. People like you are acting like this never happened, and I don’t know how you could actually be unaware of it. Some multiplayer websocket games such as slither.io are a worldwide phenomenon on par with Pokémon Go in terms of popularity.
In light of all that, I’m asking why you think this is cool because it doesn’t make sense to me.
The long term vision is to allow players to control much larger ships. True frigate class ships. I'm still in alpha right now but will continue work if there is interest.
Well if you someday write a postmorten of you experience implementing this, the HN dead hug, how to deal with it and so, it will be very helpful. Think about write down your actions everyday so that hypothetical report will be easier to write.
There has been a dedicated community of thousands of players, many of which have been playing well over a decade. Plenty of videos on youtube under either "Subspace" or more recently "Continuum".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubSpace_(video_game)
Also - a plug for my favorite Zone: HZ. www.rshl.org.