Gamelodge

Gamelodge is a place to play fun games made by other users, and build games of your own, on desktop or in VR.

Features

• Extremely bit-efficient networking
  • Roughly 2x the thoroughput of Photon
  • 65k object limit
  • Completely free of runtime memory deallocation
  • Because the network stack is so efficient, you can synchronize complex objects like ragdolls
• Save to a local file the entire networked game state as a recording
  • Great for making gameplay videos, you can re-watch what was happening from different perspectives
  • Incredibly useful for fixing bugs. Users can send devs the recording demonstrating what happened
  • Replay recordings with edited scripts to quickly verify that an issue has been fixed
• VR and Desktop supported
  • Switch back and forth at runtime via F2
• Multiplayer building
  • You can build games, write code, and test while people are playing
• Compile-free
  • All programming is done in MiniScript, a lua/python like language focused on simplicity
  • Although simple, the scripting is full-featured enough to create complex behaviors like the MuscleMover

Limitations/Issues

• The desktop building controls are slow, buggy, and difficult. It needs to be rewritten
• The scripting API should be cleaned up, it's not clear how to call certain functions
• There are a decent number of known bugs, most from unanticipated mixtures of scripts, and from race conditions
• Downloading a new asset bundle can cause you to disconnect from the server
• Functions are currently in the global namespace, there should be a requirement to import functions
• There's no lobby and only one server room

Compiling

We currently use Unity 2019.2.14f1 but later versions should work as well.