Pocket Ball - free 3D 8 ball pool in the browser, no aiming line in play mode (Three.js + our own physics)

[oreumgames]

Hi all,

Pocket Ball is 8 ball on a 7 foot table, in the browser, on PC and phones. You drag on the table to point the cue, pull the upright cue bar at the side and let go to shoot, and tap the white ball to add follow, draw or side. Play mode shows the cue and nothing else, no aiming line and no ghost ball, and you climb a ladder of 12 opponents at the local pool hall from the guy next door to the owner. Lesson mode puts the lines back and lets you practice alone, and 2P is two people on one screen. English and Korean, nothing to install.

Play (free, no sign-up): oreumgames.com/en/games/flash/pocketball/

Tech, since this is a dev forum: Three.js draws the table, balls and cue, but the physics is our own 2D sim that runs on top, at 500 steps a second. The table is 1.98 by 0.99 m and the balls are 28.575 mm radius, so the real numbers. Rolling friction is a constant plus a term proportional to speed, ball to ball restitution is 0.95 and the cushions 0.78. Follow and draw are stored on the cue ball and only applied at the moment it first contacts an object ball, side spin changes the angle off a cushion, and each pocket is modelled as the two cushion nose segments plus the jaw points, so balls rattle out of the jaws the way they do in real life. The opponents all pick from the same ball to pocket candidate list with an aiming error from 3.0 degrees down to 0.32, and from the middle of the ladder they roll the shot forward and score where the cue ball ends up. Thinking time tops out at 83 ms. The slowest frame in a 2,520 frame run was 25 ms, after the first match frame hitch was removed by warming the materials up front. The ball, cushion and pocket sounds are CC0 recordings from Pixabay, and the music is a 104 bpm loop over Dm7, G7, Cmaj7 and A7 made in code with Web Audio.

The whole thing was built and released on October 15, from a two word brief, pool game. The first version aimed the cue for you and the feedback was that it went in too easily and the game went out of it, so it became lesson mode and a play mode with no help at all. A 36 card reward system built the same morning was removed the same afternoon.

Made by a very small indie team in Korea.

One thing I would like to hear: does play mode with no aiming line feel fair to you, or do you end up wanting the ghost ball back?

Thanks for playing!