A programming language which lets you code multiplayer games like singleplayer games. Every program written in Easel is guaranteed deterministic and snapshottable, which is how it can automatically make your game multiplayer automatically using rollback netcode.
My hope is that teenagers who makes games in Scratch might like to make games in Easel because it means they can make games they can play with their friends, without having to deploy a server or learn anything about networking on synchronization. People can literally make a multiplayer game on their first day of coding.
What I don't understand about your idea is that netcode as far as I understand is way more complex than you make it seem. The netcode for something like a MOBA or MMORPG is drastically different than the netcode for a much simpler turn-based game. They have elaborate synchronization mechanisms to make the illusion not break-down in various ways due to latency.
And then even for simple turn-based games, there has to be elaborate fully-decided like state diagrams for all the various types of disconnect and latency states so that gameplay doesn't desynch or hitch in awkward ways.
Yes, I spent quite a few years building and iterating on some quite elaborate mechanisms to handle latency too: https://easel.games/docs/learn/multiplayer/rollback-netcode - it’s taken a lot of continual playtesting to discover and address many issues.
The multiplayer architecture is rollback netcode, which I think is great because it performs client-side prediction by running your full game simulation step forward on the full game state and not some subset or stripped-down version of the simulation or state. It’s the most accurate client-side prediction model you can have.
Then it achieves eventual state synchronisation by rolling back and rerunning your code when there is a prediction error. It performs automatic rubberbanding to smooth over the error corrections. All the bodies get rubberbanded, so as long as you attach your sprites to bodies (which is what you would normally do), the rubberbanding is automatic.
Rollback netcode is underutilised because it’s difficult to implement on other game engines. It requires your entire codebase and all your dependencies to be deterministic and snapshotable, and so if you’re using another engine like Unity or Godot, it won’t meet these requirements because it wasn’t designed for this. Products like Photon Quantum for Unity get around this by reimplementing all the systems like physics, RNGs and even just ArrayLists in their own deterministic manner. But you have to follow all these rules about writing your code in a multiplayer safe way and there are all these traps to avoid.
Putting the rollback netcode into the programming language means it always works 100% of the time and you can’t make a mistake, which means even a beginner programmer on their first day can make a multiplayer game. That was my ultimate goal and I think it is true that if someone who is an experienced programmer wants to hand-code a specialised rollback netcode implementation for their game then they might be able to do a better job on their game. But the defaults are really good when the rollback netcode is in the language itself and I’ve had teenagers make multiplayer games that they play with their whole class and they’ve all had a lot of fun, and that’s the main thing.
Less latency in multiplayer games or Zoom calls. Because light can travel around the Earth 7 times in one second, that means one roundtrip to a server on the other side of the world must take ~140 ms (1/7th of a second) which is a timescale you are able to feel. That's lag in multiplayer games. I'm constantly amazed that the reason why multiplayer client-side prediction strategies like rollback netcode exist is because light is slow enough on a human scale that we actually have to architect around it. Light is surprisingly slow in some ways.
Hello HN! For the past 4 years I've been making a game programming language that makes your game multiplayer automatically. There is always a lot to do when making a game engine in order to make it capable of making real games. These are the latest updates for this month!
I always use em or px, basically nothing else (except perhaps vw or vh). When something should be relative to the size of text, it's em. When it should be relative to the size of images, it's px.
I think if you're looking for other people to use your game engine, it helps to have one killer feature. I'm not clear what yours is at this point. Even if your killer feature is not something you have yet completely implemented, but it is simply a long-term goal, I think it is worth listing that front and center.
A programming language that makes your game multiplayer automatically! It integrates rollback netcode into the programming language itself, guaranteeing that whatever you code is deterministic and can be snapshotted and rolled back. Then it integrates the networking and server automatically so you can just code your game like a singleplayer game and it'll be multiplayer automatically! I've been working on this for four years now.
Hello, I am a solo developer making a game programming language with automatic multiplayer. I'm constantly trying to make it more and more powerful so that teenagers and adults alike can make the cool multiplayer games they dream of without having to deal with all the networking. This month I focused on making user interfaces better and easier, among other things, and this is my write-up.
A programming language which lets you code multiplayer games like singleplayer games. Every program written in Easel is guaranteed deterministic and snapshottable, which is how it can automatically make your game multiplayer automatically using rollback netcode.
My hope is that teenagers who makes games in Scratch might like to make games in Easel because it means they can make games they can play with their friends, without having to deploy a server or learn anything about networking on synchronization. People can literally make a multiplayer game on their first day of coding.
Currently been working on adding tilemaps.
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