gloom

a 2.5D multiplayer FPS game written in WASM and TypeScript

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Credits and sources

• Player textures: Marine from DOOM & DOOM II by id Software
• Bullet texture: Enemy Bullets by Wahib Yousaf (link)
• In game font: ZAP by John Zaitseff (link)
• UI style: 98.css by Jordan Scales (@jdan) (link)
• UI font: Microsoft Sans-Serif by Microsoft
• UI icons: Windows 98 Icons by Microsoft

Other projects that helped me:

• grecha.js by Alexey Kutepov (@rexim) (link), the inspiration for reactive.js
• Windows 98 Icon Viewer by Alex Meub (link), a great website for quickly previewing all of Windows 98's icons
• Lode's Computer Graphics Tutorial by Lode Vandevenne (link), a wonderful resource about raycasters and how to make them

How to use

When you visit the website without a valid session, you will see a prompt asking you to login.

If you don't have an account, you can close the window (by clicking the X button) or click on the help button (?), and click "I want to create an account" on the help window.

Once you're on the registration page, you will need to choose a username and a password. To view the password and username requirements, click on the help button in the window title bar.

Once you're logged in, you will see a window with two options.

Clicking on Create, will tell the game server to instantiate a game. Once the game is ready, its ID will be displayed under Your game. You can copy this ID and share it with your friends to play together. To join a game, you have to enter the correct ID in the text-box (or leave it empty if you want to join the game you've just created), and then click on the Join button.

In the waiting menu you can adjust your settings while you wait for other players to join. Once there are at least two players in the game, and every player has clicked the > ready button, a countdown will start, at the end of which the players will be allowed to move. Note that clicking the ready button again, will stop the countdown. You will have to press it again to restart it.

If you need any help with the controls, click on the help button in window title bar.

Project structure

The project has the following structure:

• Dockerfile This file describes the Docker environment necessary to build the client and the server.
• docker-compose.yml This file is a working (and production ready) docker-compose file to quickly setup and host the server.
• package.json NPM project file.
• scripts All the scripts needed to build the project.
  • tools Extra scripts that are used to generate source files at build-time.
• static Contains the files that the HTTP server will serve to the client.
  • css Stylesheet and font files.
  • html HTML files.
  • js JavaScript and WASM files.
  • img Images used by the UI.
• res Resources for the WASM game, such as textures and map data.
• src All the source files.
  • client Source code for the frontend (JavaScript).
    • wasm Source code for the game (C)
  • server Source code for the HTTP and game server (TypeScript)

Setting it up

To host the server you will need the Docker installed and configured on your system. The first step is to clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/markx86/gloom.git

If you have setup SSH access to GitHub, it is recommended you use that:

git clone [email protected]:markx86/gloom.git

After cloning the repository, enter the project root with cd gloom and run:

Note

Before running this command you might want to check out the configuration section.

docker compose up --build -d

Important

If you do not wish to run the server as a daemon, use

docker compose up --build

instead. Do note that pressing Ctrl+C or closing the terminal will also close the server.

This will take a while (up to 5 minutes or more, depending on your internet connection).

After the server is up and running you can connect to it locally, by going to http://localhost:8080, assuming you are using the same machine the server is being hosted on.

If you have any problems, you can check the server logs by using the command:

docker compose logs -f

Configuration

The server accepts the following environment variables:

• LOG_VERBOSE: Enables/Disables verbose logging. Set to 1 to enable. By default, it's disabled.
• DATABASE: Path to the database file. This a SQLite3 database path, therefore things like :memory: will also work. It is set to :memory: by default, but the provided docker-compose file will create a volume and store the database there.
• COOKIE_SECRET: The secret key used to sign the cookies. If it's not set, the server will generate a random one each time it is started.
• WSS_PORT: Controls the port on which the WebSocket server should listen for incoming connections. By default, it's set to 8492.
• HTTP_PORT: Controls the port on which the HTTP server should listen for incoming requests. By default, it's set to 8080.
• HTTPS_PORT: Controls the port on which the HTTPS server should listen for incoming requests. By default, it's set to 8443.
• HTTPS_KEY: Path to the HTTPS server's certificate key. By default, it's ./cert.key.
• HTTPS_CERT: Path to the HTTPS server's certificate. By default, it's ./cert.pem.

Important

If you're using docker-compose, you can change these options by creating a .env file in the project root, and writing your values there, in the form PARAM_NAME=param_value. For example COOKIE_SECRET=mySuperSecret1234.