> Curious what people think.

About what? The game itself is mildly interesting as some sort of blockchain mega-Risk variant, but without any sort of story about how you came up with the idea, or how you coded it, or a link to your source code, or etc etc etc this seems primarily meaningless/irrelevant here at Hacker News. I see your comment asking us to propose questions that you answer — but where are your own stories, that aren't just replies to the prompts you want us to present you with?

> You agree not to[:] reverse engineer or attempt to extract protected service logic except where the law clearly permits it

Talk about failing to understand your target audience.

Well, the purpose of this initial post was to just let people know it exists. I agree that those topics could be interesting and I might write them up in a blog.

The game doesn't really force any blockchain usage on you, but it will be optional in the future to play matches where you can win money.

Also, those terms were more or less vibed into existence so bear with me as I refine them into something solid in the near future.

Thank you for the feedback.

One of the main challenges has been making the map simulation work for hundreds of simultaneous players without the server becoming a bottleneck.

Most interactions are event-driven and the map state updates incrementally, which keeps things manageable even when many borders are shifting at once.

I've successfully tested this with 4096^2 maps and 1024 players and in those tests framerates were stable at 144 FPS, with the server ticking steadily at the standard 10 TPS.

It is built on Rust and Bevy. I'm happy to answer any questions.

How did you test with 1024 players - were they real? Often synthetic loads are very different to those caused by real players.

Bots are run on a separate thread from the main game loop and I can configure them to have a particular amount of actions per tick or second - to simulate real player action frequency.

In my tests core game loop handles 1024 bots without issues, often running 5-20x of realtime.

Weird clone of OpenFront but with no UI .. ? Custom game doesn't work, tons of errors, can't even see where I am, or understand what is going on.

Doesn't seem like you played your own game before submitting it.

This is a WIP version, and custom game seems to work for many players. I would've really appreciated if you told me how it didn't work so I can fix it.

why play when you can vibecode?

Be honest: is this just an OpenFront clone?

https://openfront.io/

It's fine if it's just a fan-clone, but you really need to be explicit about where the idea (and code) came from if that's what you've done.

Judging by the error messages, it looks like it's a bevy+wasm project. So it's not a simple fork of OpenFront.

Yes it's Bevy, with a custom backend game loop/simulation.

The idea definitely came from openfront and territorial, I've played both. But this codebase has nothing to do with them, it was built from scratch.

Thanks for the reply. I also saw some other replies stating much of the same thing. I apologize that I didn't give you more benefit of the doubt. To get a bit personal for a second: I've been having a rough go of things job-wise. There have been a lot of issues trying to find work with how competitive the job market has become with mass layoffs & the overuse of LLMs in everything. The few outlets that I've have had to try and escape those concerns have also been facing a lot of controversies with LLM-related content, too. It just feels like there's no real escape from a very negative mindset, and I chalked your project up to being "Yet another thing to be mad over." It was stupid of me.

To clarify: I was pretty torn when I had seen the video of your project; I hadn't played a round because of the queue. I was sitting there and thinking, "Well, if you have the idea of spreading between areas over a top-down static map, and you want any kind of modern weaponry in it...how do you not end up looking like OpenFront or some variation of 4x games?" I think the answer is essentially that...you don't. It's just kind of how it ends up looking.

I think I was a little bit more suspicious of your project in particular because the UI layout looks/looked exceptionally close to OpenFront's. But again, it's kind of a standard expectation thing. "Where should we put chat? Well, probably off to one side. Where do you put notifications? In that same area, I guess?" Etc. There's a natural progression of similarities.

Basically, I was wavering a bit, but jumped the gun because I was angry about things that had nothing to do with you or your work. I am sorry about that! I hope your project does well.

I don't know, looks like OpenFront in a RetroGUI? Based on the left bottom UI element an older version, otherwise remarkably close

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ckqSFbwplvY

Yeah it's heavily inspired by openfront and territorial, I've played both. My goal for this was to see how far I can push it in terms of player count and map sizes.

Very buggy, so many it's not even worth reporting, since you can't be bothered to test.

Not to be overly dismissive, but this feels like a plastic satire of a war game. Additonally, most civvy wargames tend to be based on the Avalon Hill Civilization boardgame from back in the day (which also influenced Sid Meier's Civilization), which imo peaked with Civ 4 (Civ 7 and Humankind I think is based on "History of the World").

I'd recommend reading some US Navy [0][1][2], Marines [3], and NATO [4] literature on how to better create tactical and grand strategy war games.

Lots of wargaming and intel analyst vets ended up in the boardgame publishing world.

[0] - https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/AD1001766.pdf

[1] - https://www.history.navy.mil/content/dam/nhhc/research/publi...

[2] - https://www.cna.org/reports/2004/Transforming-Naval-Wargamin...

[3] - https://www.usmcu.edu/Portals/218/Forging%20Wargamers_web.pd...

[4] - https://paxsims.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/nat...

Awesome resources, thank you for linking them!

> thank you for linking them

Appreciate it. I've been getting trolled and attempted doxxed for providing links on HN recently.

Those nation state actors failed but worst case, I and my SO still practice our trigger discipline.

Start a mailing list or something.

The sliders don't respond well, like the server is authoritative but the client isn't properly predicting where the slider will be.

I'm playing on a 144Hz monitor, but the game is struggling to hit over 80 FPS.

I keep getting errors which display in the bottom right of the screen, such as "tick" (tick failed, ZeroInvestment) errors and WebSocket receive errors.

I started a custom game and "things" are just happening super quickly. All I can seemingly do is right click some stuff and do some actions.

There is almost no feedback on the few actions you can do. Nothing much to observe. I don't even know where "I" am on the map.

Sorry but this isn't a game yet. There's no compelling core gameplay loop, too little explanation, and wayyyy too many bugs.

Hey, thank you for all these details, I really appreciate it!

I also use a 144Hz monitor and the framerate is often rock solid at the top. The problem is with browsers and battery powered devices. Chrome often locks up the game at 30, 60, or 120 FPS randomly, on battery or AC. I still haven't figured that one out.

I'm fixing some of those errors up right now. The problem is that I don't have a regular play testing base and for some players that do play it they're based relatively close to the server. I assume many issues reported here are from the US based folks, and I'm in Europe.

Thanks once again, I'll use this to improve it!

I tried a custom game. Received constant errors in the bottom right. Couldn't work out where/who I was. I could right-click and offer alliances to factions, but there was no response at any point. Couldn't work out how to do anything. (Firefox/macOS)

I've added a "How To Play" button now before you start the game, and have polished up those error paths. Now they should be much less common and displayed more nicely.

RIP

Can't enter a game, kicks me out of queue.

Doesn't seem to do anything on custom game.

Not sure why is that. Can you provide more details or try again?

Hmm, it does not seem to work on Edge browser on my Linux OS, but it loaded fine in Chrome in the same OS.

It should work on every browser that supports WebGL and SharedArrayBuffer. That should include Edge on Linux, but I'm not sure.

Yeah, I know. Probably something I did on my end.

There was Golden Age of Civilisations (or sth) a while ago. It ran Freeciv (FOSS Civ 2/3 clone) and made each turn take 4 hours and added advanced queuing tooling.

Was quite fun, maybe it still exists, haven't checked.

I clicked "Play Game" and got a message about a queue.

Maybe that experience can be improved.

Sorry, that can definitely be improved. And is probably best to remove it until the game attracts some regular players for the queue to make sense. Will do.

won't even load for me now. (Edit: it loads now)

I don't like the mixel art used