sour

sour is a complete multiplayer Sauerbraten experience in the web delivered as a single Docker image.

Overview

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.

Getting started

All you need is Earthly to build. Just run earthly +docker 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) to whatever you want (e.g 80) but the second one has to be 28785, since the frontend expects the proxy service to be at that port.

Architecture

The current implementation involves three services, each of which corresponds to a directory in services/:

• client/: A fork of BananaBread with lots of modifications to add support for QServCollect's protocol and the WebSocket intermediary. There are also significant UI changes.
• server/: A fork of QServCollect, which is a dedicated Sauerbraten server.
• 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.

License

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.