Multiplayer Asteroids with node.js

Ever since Remy Sharp’s excellent Node.js workshop a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been working on this little multiplayer demo – it’s an Asteroids style shoot-em-up. Use the cursor keys and space to shoot.

The BrowserQuest game we featured last week is impressive, but they avoided the latency and bandwidth issues with a point and click mechanic – it’s a lot harder to get real-time motion and collision detection working on this scale.

There’s a ‘dead-reckoning’ system to smooth out the noisy position data from the players, and it uses an authoritative server to stop hackers cheating. For a full explanation, see my blog post.

I’m still working on it so you might see the odd glitch, but let me know how it works for you.

Play MMOsteroids
Full write up at seb.ly