Show HN: Bosconian (1981), in 3-D | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Bosconian (1981), in 3-D

nolannicholson.com

Great! I would love to see more classic games in the browser. The controls really throw me off though--do enough people really prefer inverted vertical controls for it to be the default in so many games? UP to go down, DOWN to go up?

It made sense to me. I guess it's how you interpret the controls of an actual aircraft and how they map to keyboard controls. In aircraft controls it's "pull back" to increase altitude (up) and "push forward" to decrease altitude (down).

I imagine it this way, each direction key maps to a part of the topside of the aircraft

- up: front/nose of aircraft, pressing up pushes pressure on the nose which would make it tilt downward, hence going down or losing altitude

- down: back of aircraft, pressing down pushes pressure on the backside of the aircraft which would make it tilt upward, hence going up or gaining altitude

same for left and right

Yeah, it's funny. For anything involving controlling an aircraft or spacecraft I prefer aircraft style controls (i.e., pull back for UP, and push forward for DOWN).

For FPS I prefer the opposite: forward is look up, back is look down, with very few exceptions. I'm not really sure why this would be but it throws me completely if I try to play most FPS (and even some six-axis games) with aircraft style controls.

Felt very natural with Bosconian 3D though.

Your own descriptions suggest the underlying reason for this - e.g. 'pull up' - the controller maps to the orientation of the thing you are controlling vs 'forward is look up' - the controller maps to where you want to look.

There are two theories as to the origination of the inverted Y default. First, the standard in aeronautics has always been inverted Y controls, this carried over into flight simulators and games like Wing Commander. For FPS specifically, I have always supported the theory that with the massive popularity of N64 007 Goldeneye amongst a large segment of the game playing and development community during the later half of the ‘90s is responsible. Goldeneye was inverted Y by default and a large group of gamers and devs got there first exposure to FPS via N64 multiplayer Goldeneye.

> Great! I would love to see more classic games in the browser.

Me too, and you might like these as well in that case (shameless plug: they're mine):

- Asteroids: https://arcade.ly/games/asteroids/

- Star Castle: https://arcade.ly/games/starcastle/

- A very early prototype Space Invaders game: https://arcade.ly/games/space-invaders/

This is a great version of Bosconian - really enjoying it although, so far, I suck at it. I was a big fan of the original too, although I only ever had the ZX Spectrum conversion - it was a pretty decent attempt though and one of my favourite shooters on the platform (still wasn't great at it though).

Anyway, nice work, this is bookmarked.

This is such a great 3D version, very faithful to the original game. Awesome work.

I am really digging the code. Clean, modern, vanilla js! The amount of polish in this game is very appreciated!

I see that the assets were made in blender. I hadn't thought to use pixel-art textures with low-poly in that way. It looks fantastic, especially with the low-res rendering.

Thanks - I really appreciate it!

I got a lot of inspiration for the model style (and a helpful making-of timelapse) from @librorumque on Twitter: https://twitter.com/librorumque/status/1205080756508352512

On Brave, pressing SPACE just destroys the ship?

Same on firefox

Kind of boggles the mind that we've had video games for over 40 years.

Nice work! I really like the art style. It captures the minimalism of the original, while not resorting to voxels or a "hipster flat low poly" look.

Sadly, I just get a black screen with a white rectangle in the lower-left corner. Chromium 81.

Hmm, bizarre. Thanks for letting me know.

The white rectangle is a loading bar - it should stretch across the bottom of the screen as the game loads. I've had it hang once or twice, but a page refresh fixed the issue in those cases.

It may be something to do with audio, see Chromium's console: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1gpEX5mTiDO7hkJEkOzqhbSBnbW...

Does the entire web page depend on audio working?

I get that occasionally in Chrome 81 as well but refreshing usually fixes.

Nice work! Is this first made in blender and then exported JS HTML5?

Thanks! The models were made in Blender, but the engine was made from scratch in vanilla JS using WebGL. The code is public: https://github.com/NolanNicholson/bosco-3d

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