According to the reddit comments the world is 165888x79872 pixels, and the guy at the beginning is 40 pixels tall. If we assume he's 6 feet tall, the world is ~25000 x 12000 feet, 4.7 x 2.3 miles, or 7.6 x 3.7 km.
Hence the two miles comment full west from center. I declare Randall and dividuum 1st and 2nd place winners of the internet today. What's the under-over on tech world productivity loss this morning?
There's a serious psychological phenomenon where working in a place with no windows decreases productivity by a lot. This has been attributed to the need to look out into the world in order to imagine solutions that aren't readily apparent.
Scrolling through this was like looking out the window times 100. I've already gotten more done in the last hour after looking at it than I usually do in a day.
you guys have totally destroyed this thing ;) the beauty was that it got me to wander around like a little kid for a while. the little spots by the beach, textures, jokes, wondering which way was out of a mine shaft, the sense of taking a hike for a while. not zooming around like an all knowing cyborg.
After 40 minutes or more of doing that, I think it doesn't take away the wonder if I stitch together a large image just to check if I'd missed anything in the sky or underground.
These sites do make it a bit too easy, but then again, it's a nice display of a piece of technology.
I don't know if you've ever played the 1980s-90s Spectrum/Amiga Dizzy series, but exploring this squirted pretty much the same wonderful cocktail of neurotransmitters as exploring Spellbound Dizzy did when I was a small boy.
I think this browser is best for making sure you didn't miss anything. Part of what makes the original comic effective is that your viewing window is so small that it makes the size of the world feel very large.
Randall is one of those artists that truly enriches (my) life. The IP addressing visual and the other comic that illustrated the size of scale among astronomical objects were two others that impressed me. This one tops them all.
Not sure, they don't seem to be falling. I thought they might be a reference to the Star Trek "whale probe" from The Voyage Home [1] but they're too small for that. Maybe just some random fun like the flying or underground jellyfish.
Those aren't underground jellyfish, they are underwater. That part of the word (west of center, where the ships are) is ocean. But yeah, it's confusing at first.
Look like humpback whales. Unlikely to be a reference, but it did remind me of the whale sequence from the second Fantasia movie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGZeT07rqlU
When you're in a region without a matching image (i.e. in the blank sky or uncarved ground), the tile is only a 1x1 image; in Firefox at least, the default image rendering technique for this is bad, as it uses something along the lines of bicubic interpolation to some shade of grey, where what is intended is that it be a solid block of colour.
If you'd like the full-screen view and ability to navigate using the keyboard, but with tiles that load when needed not just when you stop moving, try http://ares.aylett.co.uk/xkcd/ -- it uses the original tiles, so you've probably got at least some of them cached already :).
Only browser zoom, but I think that helps keep the mystique (and I don't want to try to implement it myself).
Reminds me a little of Proteus (http://www.visitproteus.com) which I just came across a few days ago. There's something special about wandering around in a world where you don't know why you're there or when or where it will end.
Normally a curmudgeon, I love everything about this story. The original comic is brilliant, and the various HN takes on it are getting better and better. Thanks everyone!
There’s also this map: http://sumamimasen.com/xkcd/1110/. It has some of the usability of this rent-a-geek map while keeping the perhaps-symbolic inability to see ahead of the original comic. It also loads faster than this rent-a-geek map.
Features: use the arrow keys to scroll (you actually can’t click and drag anymore). You can’t zoom out, but you can hold Shift to scroll quickly. This map loads tiles while you scroll, so you can keep on scrolling without stopping.
If you think this is cool, check out a game with the same 2D "grid-like" world that blew me away when I played it a couple years ago: Within a Deep Forest. http://nifflas.ni2.se/?page=Within+a+Deep+Forest
Love the Cryptonomicon influences. In case anyone is wondering what those mushroom-shaped caverns are that jut up off some of the tunnels... well, you can read the book and find out ;)
Epic action sequences combined with cryptography, information theory, currency/economics, WWII, and a crazy ambitious tech startup idea. It doesn't get any better than that.
If you mean the maps-type interface, just look at the page source - it's a couple lines of javascript. This is just Leaflet's standard behavior. The map itself is a series of image tiles with a predictable naming convention.
Leaflet wasn't used on the real site though, it was used to here for easier navigation (and it's an awesome JS library). Here's the JS library xkcd.com was using
It's awesome, but the guy who coded it forgot to replace the all black squares by <div class=black> . that would've loaded so much faster - and even better with class=white above the earth.
According to the reddit comments the world is 165888x79872 pixels, and the guy at the beginning is 40 pixels tall. If we assume he's 6 feet tall, the world is ~25000 x 12000 feet, 4.7 x 2.3 miles, or 7.6 x 3.7 km.