The people I had testing it shared the same question: "what the hell is its purpose?". Well; surprise, it doesn't have one. The idea was born when r0bin and me were playing Bomberman (sweet game by the way), and I wondered if it was possible to recreate such a thing in Javascript (+AJAX for multiplayer).

The problem with Javascript is the lag you automatically have, you can't get around the headers you're sending each time. At the best moment until now, I noted down a latency around 200. That means you would be able to send five actions each second. In a normal multiplayer game you should have a latency < 75 to keep it playable and fair for the other players.

So, the plan on recreating Bomberman faded but a new one was born, creating something where you can walk around and chat, that's it, nothing more. It is working now (but can be very buggy), but will most likely stay where in the stage it is now, I don't see any bright future for it.

The code isn't magical either, it is the typical result of working on it in seperated sessions spread over a couple of days, not commenting the code and my extreme lack of knowledge from Javascript. I only know the very basics which seems to be leading to a lot of bugs in attempts to advanced applications. The serverside synchronisation is managed through a PHP script that returns an array to the Javascript application of the location of the different players. The game supports virtually an unlimited amount of players.

Even though I'm not going to "finish" this code, doesn't mean I'm not going to create more of these things in the future, I actually quite enjoyed creating this.

Details

http://iron.randombase.com/multi/

Arrow keys to move, "enter" (return) to chat.