Ready Up n Roll

Credits

Standing on the shoulders of giants. Here are as many of them as I could find.

People

  • Drack, (That's me! My online pseudonym anyway), of Brain Vacation Studios (my LLC). As for what I did directly, I did the design, the QA testing, some manual programming, coordination & production, system administration & management, funding, and wrote most if not all of the wording.
  • Everyone who made the things on this page. Every project below is the work of real people, most of them volunteers, who gave it away for free. Viva la open source community! https://opensource.org Y'all are the unsung heroes of the digital age, so I'm going to try to do some singing.

AI

  • Claude, made by Anthropic: wrote most of the code for Project WhiteSpace and this site alongside Drack, working through Claude Code and/or Claude Desktop or Web. Note from Claude: (Hi! That's me. Thanks for having me.)
  • Gemini, made by Google: provided second opinions, red team security testing, and more.

Project WhiteSpace

The game in your browser

The host's computer

  • Node.js: runs the server, including its zlib (by Jean-loup Gailly & Mark Adler), worker threads, and single executable applications (how the .exe is made)
  • Colyseus, by Endel Dreyer and contributors (colyseus, @colyseus/schema, @colyseus/ws-transport): the multiplayer server
  • Express: serves the game and the uploads
  • ws and msgpackr: the live connections and the compact messages sent over them
  • cloudflared and Cloudflare's free Quick Tunnels: the invite link that works without router setup
  • Microsoft's .NET Framework, C# compiler and Windows Forms: the host's status window
  • Windows: what the host app runs on

Building it

  • Vite, with Rolldown, Oxc, Lightning CSS and PostCSS: packs the browser game together
  • esbuild, by Evan Wallace: squeezes the server into one file
  • postject: tucks it all inside the .exe
  • npm: fetches every package listed at the bottom of this page
  • Git, GitHub, GitHub Actions (checkout, setup-node, upload-artifact), GitHub Releases and the GitHub CLI: keep the code, build and test the .exe, and publish the downloads
  • Playwright and Chromium: the automated tests that play the game in a real browser
  • Python and Bash: little helper scripts along the way (including the one that wrote the package list on this page)

Testing it

  • Blender: for prepping 3D models for upload
  • CGTrader: for providing 3D models
  • A variety of sources of 2D images, for testing the upload and download of pictures, including Monte Cook's The Darkest House
  • The various manufacturers of my hardware, including but not limited to NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, Logitech, Blackview and more (I intend to flesh out this list more later)

The web, and the formats it reads

  • WebGL, WebAssembly, WebSockets, the Web Audio API (and AudioWorklet), WebCodecs and microphone access: the browser features that make 3D, physics and voice possible, and the people at the W3C, WHATWG and Khronos Group who wrote them down
  • Opus, from Xiph.Org and the IETF: the voice chat codec
  • Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari: the browsers it plays in
  • glTF / GLB (Khronos Group), Wavefront OBJ, and STL (3D Systems): the 3D model formats
  • PNG, JPEG, GIF (CompuServe) and WebP (Google): the picture formats, which WhiteSpace reads and writes with its own code, thanks to their published specs and DEFLATE (Phil Katz)

Inspiration

  • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Nintendo): the idea for Focus (F) comes from its targeting camera
  • Every tabletop RPG group that ever played over the internet and wished it felt more like sitting at the same table

This site

  • Plain HTML and CSS, nothing else
  • Cloudflare (Workers static assets and DNS): hosts it for free and forwards readyupandroll.com here
  • Inter, by Rasmus Andersson: the font, if your device has it (otherwise your system's own)
  • Your device's emoji (🎲 🔗 📅), drawn by its makers from the Unicode standard
  • GitHub: keeps this site's code

Every package Project WhiteSpace uses

All 235 of them, including the ones the packages above rely on, and builds for systems you may never use. Each one links to its page, with its license beside it.

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