sour is a complete Cube 2: Sauerbraten experience in the web delivered as a single Docker image

I have always loved playing Sauerbraten because of its simplicity: it's fast to download, easy to pick up, and keeps you in the action with instant respawns. Despite playing lots of games over the course of my life I haven't really found anything that scratches the same itch.

Some years ago I found BananaBread, which was a basic tech demo that uses Emscripten to compile Sauerbraten for the web. The project was limited in scope and done at a time when bandwidth was a lot more precious. It also lacked multiplayer out of the box.

My goal was to ship an updated version of it in a single Docker image that I could deploy anywhere and play without forcing anyone to download the whole game. That's where sour comes in.

All you need is Docker and Earthly to build. Just run earthly +image and it will make the sour:latest image.

To use the sour image, expose ports 1234 and 28785 when you run a container like this:

docker run --rm -it -p 1234:1234 -p 28785:28785 sour:latest

It's worth nothing that you can change the first mapping (1234:1234) to whatever you want (e.g 80:1234) but the second one has to be 28785, since the frontend expects the proxy service to be at that port.

Here is a high level description of the repository's directory structure:

• services/game/cube2: A fork of BananaBread, which was kripken's initial attempt at getting a version of Sauerbraten running using Emscripten. He forked Sauerbraten at the mainline r4059, I upgraded to r4349, then finally upgraded to the latest mainline at the time r6519. Contains a handful of modifications and restrictions to make sure it can run well in the web.
• services/game/assets: A checkout of Sauerbraten's packages/ directory, which contains all of the game's default assets. Also includes Sour's asset bundling mechanism to generate prepackaged Emscripten file bundles for each game map.
• services/server/: A fork of QServCollect, which is a dedicated Sauerbraten server.
• services/proxy/: A fork of wsproxy which I changed to only allow proxying from TCP 28785 to UDP 28786. This was the quickest way I found to get client/server communication working, though presumably you could just do this in a Python script.
• services/client/: A React web application that glues together the compiled Sauerbraten code and our asset fetching mechanism.

The resulting Docker image will run services on these ports when started:

• tcp:1234: An nginx server that serves up the client, compiled Sauerbraten binaries, and assets.
• tcp:28785: The hacky wsproxy version we use that proxies WS connections to the container's UDP port 28786.
• udp:28786: A real QServCollect server. Typically you don't expose this, but if you want to do crossplay (connect with real Sauerbraten) you absolutely can.

All contributions are welcome. Developing Sour is made a bit easier with Earthly but there are still some caveats.

To hack on Sour:

1. Run earthly +game (compiles the game), earthly +assets (builds its assets for the web,) and earthly +image-slim (builds the Sour image without assets.)
2. If you want to work on multiplayer, run this Docker container: docker run --rm -it -p 28785:28785 sour:slim. It makes the QServCollect server available (over a WebSocket) on 28785.
3. Start the web client.
   1. If you have warm, run warm shell, cd services/client and run yarn serve.
   2. If you do not have warm, run docker run --rm -it --volume=$(pwd):$(pwd) -w $(pwd) --init --network=host node:14.17.5 /bin/bash, cd services/client and run yarn serve.
4. Navigate to http://localhost:1234. To recompile the game, just do earthly +game and refresh the page. The same applies to earthly +assets. If you change the client code, also just refresh.

Check out the roadmap below to see what you might be able to help with.

• Restore the rendering pipeline to working condition
• Fix up the main menu
  • Make sure textures used in the main menu are not downsized
  • Remove options not pertinent to the web version
  • Allow the user to connect to the Sour server
• Fix full screen UX
• Add pretty loading screen before canvas is ready
• Improve map transitions and use real renderprogress for asset downloads
• Fix the transparency in the cursor texture
• Fix model textures. For some reason none of them are working.
• Issue with name being malformed (bad welcome packet?)
• Make it so players cannot change the map to one that does not exist
  • Come up with a better cache invalidation strategy (likely commit hash?) After this, we're back to working condition
• Allow for players to create custom matches
• Allow Sour to read from the real master server and connect to real Sauerbraten servers
• Support saving and loading .ogz maps from the user's device
• Save demos for any game played to IndexedDB and allow for download
• Demo player with seek/play/pause
  • Stretch goal: generate gifs in the browser

Each project that was forked into this repository has its own original license intact, though the glue code and subsequent modifications I have made are licensed according to the MIT license specified in LICENSE.