Friday, December 12th, 2008
Travians: Sims meets Cultures, with Ajax
Steve Mattison let us know about a new AJAX game has been released by the makers of that old popular PHP-based village building game Travian. This one is more like Sims meets Cultures, and it is called Travians:
“Travians is a browser game in which you rise to the challenge of
everyday life as a villager. This means more than just specializing in
your occupation, building your own home or deciding whether you enjoy
games more than fighting: The most important thing is communication
within the huge village community. This is the only way to get fun
clubs and strong guilds. Become a Travian and experience a whole new
online world!
3.6 rating from 39 votes
It looks great :)
It should also be mentioned that Travian has probably the largest greasemonkey user community of any site/game/app I’ve seen..
Hackable (or ‘enhanceable’) games are better..
Yeah, this looks great. I’m glad to see that it’s possible to have this RPG style gameplay with absolutely NO plugins, Flash or otherwise. Is there a 3D library available via ajax? I wonder if eventually we will see games in 3D this way too….
This is not the only RPG style game with just DHTML/JavaScript. I’ve been working on mine for a while (shameless plug: Mutant Freaks of Nature), and I’m sure there are others out there. I have to admit that I’m surprised I haven’t seen more of this sort of thing out in the wild.
(Old man voice): “Back in my day, ehhh, all we had was TRIGLAV by ‘SmokeyMonkeys’, and we liked it that way!” (Seriously though, quite an achievement for 2002, intricate graphics, a tiled map, animation and layering, and may have even worked in Netscape 4.)
Hm, that link didn’t seem to work.
http://www.smokymonkeys.com/triglav/
@Schill:
Indeed, I remember playing it back then. The artwork was the biggest asset IMO.
It’s an impressive achievement, but the interface responsiveness is really quite shockingly bad. If I didn’t know as much as I do about the potential of javascript/dom etc technology, I say “javascript sucks. Why didn’t they use flex or flash or silverlight, you know, something faster!”. But in this case, I have to conclude that just not enough attention was paid towards interface optimization on this thing. It really could be a lot more responsive, and I cannot fathom why they didn’t built it to be responsive from the ground up.
Coming soon will also http://www.sobrevivencia.com.br.
Another DHTML/JavaScript Game Online.
It looks great :) +1
After playing Travians for a few days, I realized that it satisfies the definition of a MMORPG, and even improves the genre in several areas (and also appears to be balanced very well). I have been playing character-driven MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games) for ten years ever since Ultima Online launched.
I voted four out of five stars because the game doesn’t appear to know who it’s for, nor how to reach its audience. The graphics are childish, but the game-play is deep and the content (much of it user-generated) is rich, but mature. Reporters at mmorpg.com, Massively.com, and Stratics.com might be interested… if they knew the game existed.