Thinking back to it, it was really ahead of its time, not only because it was massively multiplayer, but it had a great level editor and was doing user-created content in the late '90s.
--edit--
Oldest I could find on the wayback machine is from 1999, but that's a later version that was a standalone exe. http://web.archive.org/web/19991012175711/http://graalonline...
--edit 2--
Here's a nice writeup: https://graal.in/t/graal-zelda-online-historical-thread/1420...
Half related fun fact: I was also behind the very first leak of the SNES Starfox 2 ROM onto the web. One of the devs, which I prob shouldn’t name (though I think it is common knowledge now) was a fan of the site. He got in touch and we did an exclusive interview and ROM release.
It's sad to see it go. I really wish we could have a game experience that had the community graal did. There's not much with that level of involvement for players anymore; it's all now downstream of ivory towers and extremely restricted.
It was my first real social experience online, and inspired in part the hobby projects that led me into software as a career. Thanks so much :)
Random memory: using infinite gold hacks and the suicide dagger (which would the drop gold for other players) over and over hour hours inside the throne room or the castle west of Burger Refuge.
Also when you went to sleep in a bed, your body disappeared and only your head remained visible, floating above the pillow. I found it pretty funny for some reason.
Edit: this was the Java version's homepage: http://web.archive.org/web/19990423103617/http://www.cyberjo...
Although I’d probably get bored of such a game these days, I’d probably have a lot of fun building it out and watching a community grow from playing it.
I sometimes wondered about the developers who built this game. Maybe they were the age I am now when they wrote it. Is it my turn now to build a game like this for some new younger generation? A circle of life? Eh, I don’t know, I feel like kids these days just don’t play these kind of games anymore on a PC.
In fact, developing new content for the game became the fun itself.
Codein here btw (ignore the icky nickname - is what it is).
OP of the writeup: "Goatse" Ah that takes me back.
I guess it's like looking up your ex every now and then. You insensitive clod.
But I didn't realize its main website had been taken down, as I was literally on it a few months ago. Did it die completely? I am no longer able to login with the client.
That's too bad. It really was ahead of its time technologically; it's where my programming life got started and I was intimately familiar with graalscript and GS2.
I owe my career to that game!
Stefan Knorr inspired me to get into development and is a legend in my mind, I recall staying up at 4am walking around in early builds of Graal2K with him and seeing the infancy of "GANIs" (Graal Animations). Unixmad on the other hand...
If anyone knows what happened to Birdbird let me know, he was the most naturally talented level designer ever!
My older brother downloaded it thinking it was just a Zelda 1 clone. I discovered it had a quest editor. And it was a very magical moment for me.
I spent hundreds of hours never completing any of my projects. It was the first online community I ever joined and actively participated in.
Eventually I yearned for for power and discovered Dark Basic. Now I’m a software dev.
Zelda Classic was a major spark in my life. And it’s a really cool piece of software. 100% original code, (obviously the default assets are lifted… from another project). It’s got to be a 20 year old project at this point.
My developer career also started with gaming.
The StarCraft map/script editor was my entry drug.
Good times.
Almost as instrumental as my dad's Ti 83 Plus in my eventual career path
I remember getting the Ti83+ in High School and trying to make a Snake game. I followed a tutorial, and I barely knew what I was doing. But man, was it fun!
Very cool port, I like that it tries to integrate it into the browser features instead of calling it a day after compiling. The lack of D-pad support is a bit jarring considering gamepads are supported but it was still very playable.
Might make sense to have dpad be the default.
Also thank you for this work! When WASM was first announced this is the kind of project that I envisioned we'd see more of. Instead, everything has been mobile-centric and app-centric but you give me hope.
If you have Godot or Unity or some other game engine that does web exports, try playing the native and web versions back-to-back of any game that draws a software mouse cursor, and don't hide the native hardware cursor so you can compare how much the software cursor lags the hardware cursor.
The cynic in me says Google deliberately adds lag to browser games to guard the multi-billions of Play Store game revenues. Web audio has 300ish millisecond latency on many (not all) Android devices.
And while I understand your cynicism, I don't think it's deliberate as much as it's complacency, given that it's latency issues all the way down when it comes to modern user interfaces.
A literal decade ago Microsoft Research uploaded a video highlighting how much of an effect minimizing latency for touchscreens had on the user experience[0]. The vast majority of tablets still utterly suck in this regard a decade later, and I wonder if any manage to get below the 10ms barrier.
And of course there is Dan Luu's famous 2017 article on computer latency in general[1].
Zelda Classic is a very open ended game engine that happens to have Zelda 1 assets baked in
I recall people making entire Metroidvanias with it
God speed to OP.
https://torrentfreak.com/images/storman-judgment.pdf
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4615448-Nintendo-Lov...
A similar case is when the PS3 Slim was released without OtherOS support and later removed from existing consoles with a firmware-update that really incited research and development into the PS3 console security, which led to a full break around late 2010 and Sony attempting to retaliate with smear-campaign and prosecution(s) for copyright infringement across the USA and Europe. Some of those were more successful than others.
There have been public emulators for recent consoles from Nintendo and Sony and they've managed to stay up without any cease-and-desist or lawsuits so one would imagine they are doing something correctly to protect themselves (such as not being associated with piracy and some of the shady monetisation involved with that).
I initially played with EMSCRIPTEN as well, starting from GemRB, an open-source reimplementation of the engine. But that was boring, as I wasn't really getting any sense of how things were working under the hood.
So I started reverse-engineering the various file formats (a website called IESDP had most things figured out already) and converting them to PNG, JSON and other web formats. At that point I only knew PHP which made it a pain to work with binary data. Then, I started rebuilding the game from scratch: pathfinding, streaming huge maps using small tiles, animations...
10 years later, there's still that one single room and single character that were implemented, but it was still fun times.
I got pretty far but there would have been years and years of tweaks to get it just right, so I gave up.
Apple users need to ask Apple to use a tiny bit of their fortune to make it possible for developers to test Safari and Safari Beta on their preferred OS/device, otherwise small projects can't support it.
>WebGL does not support that, so the entire shader needed to be redesigned
I'm blown away how WebGL has come along. But then theres people like this. Great job!
I am 52 years old.
An MMORPG based on the game Secret of Mana, started around 2003-2004.
Because let's say you just wanted a 2d game engine using SDL without shaders and using the mouse. Why do we need to drag the entire browser with 1000 APIs and features into it?
Just add something like a framebuffer and mouse input to web assembly. Distribute via IPFS or something.
But yes, Wasm is not just for the browser, you can run it in Node. Or a custom runtime: https://wasmer.io/
The idea that web assembly is not meant to be the platform to run primitives on stems from the political and technical approach initially used to get web assembly inserted into browsers. The basic concept is that it was much easier for people to accept if it was "only the compute part" and also practically speaking only made sense to leverage the extensive UI and other functionality of the browser. Which made it very easy to say it's just for compute.
It's amazing that people are still stuck on that. That just goes to the power of PR and poor adaptability of the average brain. Even Brendan Eich was in a web assembly issue wondering when they were going to add some kind of minimal UI functionality.
Look at for example the web assembly shell and WASI to see how input / out has reluctantly been added to make it so these systems can have some utility on the server.
The only real reason that there hasn't been something like a serious extension to WASI for UI things is because people accept the status quo. We will forever ship a large monolithic overlay operating system controlled by a single megacorp and everyone will use that.
Except for one "competitor" which actually is also mostly controlled by the same megacorp.
Trying it out, it does not load in Firefox 81 (potentially due to some restrictive security setting here?) but runs great in Chromium after an update.
One very minor suggestion: Can you tell me what keys to use (in the UI)?
I figured out the arrow keys, but I just don't know what keys map to A & B.
This is happening because the CSS uses `prefers-color-scheme` media queries – you can't use those and also have a site theme switcher.
