Castle Game Engine: Web target – big progress, first 3 demos to try
8 comments
·January 19, 2025tomovo
Nice 90s vibe. Web target is cool. The invaders demo though... I have to say AD+W is not a good set of key bindings for that game.
spartanatreyu
WASD are the normal commands for movement in games.
Pressing forwards to shoot feels wrong though.
This feels like it would be better with double keybinds. Arrows + Space for non-gamers, WASD + space for gamers.
Don't just change it to arrows though, that's going to be painful for laptop users who don't have those crappy half sized arrow keys (see macbook, framework, etc...).
lazycog512
WASD is more of a mouse+keyboard thing since in a standard desk layout you can't extend your arms nicely
ZXCV(ASDF)+arrows I would say is more standard for non-mouse games with keyboard bindings, cave story and touhou both go this route.
vunderba
> WASD are the normal commands for movement in games
Maybe for first-person shooters, but not for shmups, and definitely not for classic arcade style games.
To your second point the reason it feels unnatural is because mapping movement + actions to a single hand is usually not a good idea if you have the opportunity to distribute them.
justmedep
It’s also the default in Factorio
mathgladiator
Cool. I love to see progress for any new engine.
wizzwizz4
If you press Ctrl+Alt+Delete, it thinks you're still holding Ctrl+Alt afterwards, even if you're not. The same for Alt+Tab. The web exposes whether modifiers are pressed in the keydown event, but the game engine is trying to keep track of this information separately for some reason. (I'm not sure whether this is a Castle Game Engine, pas2js, or fpc library bug.)
Very cool!
The wasm file here could be optimized more. It looks like a 43 MB wasm is downloaded, and wasm-opt -O3 shrinks that to just 14 MB. It might also be faster that way (due to inlining and other optimizations). Startup will definitely be faster.