Hi everyone, I made this! I already told my whole story in this article (if you'd rather watch a video essay about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CikpAHiPlmQ) so not much more to add other than I'm still (slowly) working on Line Rider! If you have any questions here I am
Wow the poverty of my imagination 5 minutes ago. I read the start of your blog and I was like this sounds lame and geeky and I imagine some sort of I don't know like Bob sledding like 2D color game kind of weird thing and just sounded weird. And then I watched your video and I was like oh my God. It puts a smile on my face it's cool and thrilling and ASMR and something I'd never even heard about. thanks for helping provide this chance to open my mind to something new and really cool and thanks for like sharing your passion.
Hats off for this masterpiece, David — and my congratulations for not letting this dream escape but working your way through to see it bloom to fruitition.
I had immediate flashbacks to my old modder days for Jedi Knight and DN3D, I was reminded of the endless fun we had creating worlds out of the puzzle pieces we were handed on our underpowered machines.
Playing with GTA3 config settings, cheating physics engines in Stunts, watching the releases of the demoscene with awe. The time was magical and feels nostalgic in retrospect. I feel like pulling out one of my early works and doing the same.
Most impressive though I think is the development you did as an artist. Starting from the effect based presentation in your early works, it's wholesome to see you take all of the stuff you learned about physics engines, still top it off with more you've learned along the way — but then let it all take a backseat to telling a story instead. One of drama, hope, despair, struggle and eventually, "escape".
Thanks for making my day.
There's a drawer in my closet that's labeled "unfinished business".
Oh, the hours I played creating the craziest tracks in the undocumented editor barely hidden away behind Shift+F1, reliably making the car hit the ground at a certain angle and speed, triggering a bug (probably an unchecked signed wraparound) that would make it accelerate infinitely into orbit.
Whoa. As someone who used to "play around" with Line Rider back in the day, I had no idea that was actually possible. That end sequence was amazing! The music score on the ascent was a perfect match. I felt like I was watching the final scene of a James Bond movie or something.
I was just about to ask you what the last item was in the track (that meme) but realized I didn't actually read your blog post and just watched the video. WHOA. Major, major props for such a great post to accompany the video with. I'm sharing this with everyone my age that knows what Line Rider is :)
Hi Conundrumer! I was part of the Line Rider community in the early days making manual tracks under the name Holcomb227.
Your dedication is really impressive. It seemed like the community had many perfectionists and/or artists and I wonder what they're doing now.
Holcomb!!! It's great to meet you again! And yes the community still has perfectionists and artists!
Also do you have any of your old Line Rider videos or .sol saves (specifically "The Amazing Nose Manual", "Manuals", "Watch it Now")? If you do, it would be great to get them archived by Rabid Squirrel: https://www.dropbox.com/request/4tqU7np9RJrfu17LvBae
Unfortunately the computer I used to create most of my tracks and videos has had its hard drive wiped multiple times throughout the years. I did create a few tracks on my friend's laptop (now broken) so I'll check if that data can be recovered.
It's so cool to see these kinds of interactions happen. The size of the internet (and the world) is smaller than you might think! It puts a smile on my face :)
It's always amazing to see what creative people can do with what is very likely a bug in the game engine. I suspect that the developpers of Line Rider didn't originally intend for people to be able to do the majority of the tricks on this track, but we could argue that it would be a lesser game if it didn't allow these techniques.
It reminds me of bunny hopping and similar "bugs" in old FPS engines that turned out so popular that they sometimes ended up being purposefully implemented in subsequent engines.
> It reminds me of bunny hopping and similar "bugs" in old FPS engines that turned out so popular that they sometimes ended up being purposefully implemented in subsequent engines.
Skiing in Starsiege: TRIBES immediately sprang to mind--and the wailing and gnashing of teeth that followed when they tried to reduce/limit it in Tribes 2 (only to add it back in with the "classic" mod).
Making the video, did you control the character directly or was it like a tool-assisted speedrun? And how much actually requires your own input, given how (iirc) there's some tracks that just run themselves?
(Not the author, but I've played Line Rider a lot a long time ago.) The character isn't directly controllable. They're affected by gravity, and collision with user-drawn lines. You can also draw "boost" lines that accelerate the character when touching, and "decoration" lines that don't interact with the character.
It loaded for me in under 5 seconds or something and runs great; impressive performance.
Edit: I'm new to linerider but is it super common to have the tracks set to music? Could be cool to have some basic ability to have a music track in app.
I started with loading the save files using an existing JS library. And then, with the help from past modders who decompiled the original Flash version, I was able to port the physics into JS. I had a lot of reference save files to verify if I did it properly.
Please post again directly as Show HN. I would love to see more community response and add ons to your work, and find the next serendipitous connection.
In all seriousness, Wow, this is really cool. Reading through the readmes was admittedly less interesting :) than firing up the editor, getting confused for about 2 minutes, then going "oh" once I got the relationship between metagons and jigs, and that the kernel was basically a placement system based on a rule engine combined with a solver. Coool.
This is admittedly very over my head :) (I may or may not have tried deleting most of the metagons to see if I could start with with simpler layouts, but then I just got handed lots of single-metagon renders instead.)
This makes me think of a bunch of a different categories of Android apps:
- "paint by number" thingies that let you passively "color" pictures by matching up numbered colors with a pixellated numbered grid based on a supplied image
- pattern generators that let you create your own wallpapers, quite a few based on tesselated designs ("geometric pattern" and "tangram generator" are good keyphrases; "wallpaper pattern" also seems to weed out lock-screen pattern generators)
- active wallpapers that display graphical effects of different kinds
- "geometric drawing" apps that generally use some kind of rule system as the basis of control
There are likely other general categories I'm not thinking of.
This system doesn't directly fit exactly into any of the boxes defined above, but the apparent widespread popularity(?) for the above kinds of apps may suggest the existence of a target demographic that might like being available to play with this kind of thing on a phone or tablet. The only consideration is the learning curve.
I cannot deny that I'm describing several months/subprojects-worth of work to port the renderer to run within Android, replace the AWT/Swing UI with something that would be intuitive on touchscreens of various sizes, figure out what crowd(s) to make the app appeal to (eg, solely technical focus, or general passive/"arty" demographic)... but if you ever wanted to showcase the project further, given that the architecture is already written in Java, an Android port almost seems like a shoo-in answer. (I'd actually forgotten it was written in Java when I went "ooh, I want to play with this on my phone.")
Hmm; I made a wall of text to say "port this to Android". I'm more trying to say, "if you have the motivation, porting to Android may have positive results". :)
Thanks for sharing. It's very cool to see the results of sticking to/studying/exploring the depths of the implications of a specific rule system for as long as you have.
When the whole thing came together and was working I lost the fire for it. Really have no urge to work on it now. Believe me, I've tried too much. Cold wet ashes.
But it's been well smeared around the world and I'm pretty sure what I've found won't be lost. So that's good.
I'm on a totally different project now. Meditation basically.
So, greetings fellow artschool alumnus. What's your big computer project?
I can understand being done with something as complex to reason about yet fundamentally self-consistent (ie, lacking novel/unexpected details to discover). Heh, "cold wet ashes" is more interesting than "old chewing gum", I might borrow that :)
Perhaps someone could file "port to Android" on GitHub and tag it "good first issue for newcomers"... xD
At the end of the day, you stuck in there and finished it, and cold wet ashes are arguably better than fire drenched in burnout. (Ooh. That fell out nice. What's the meta equivalent of a rhyme?)
Meditation is interesting. I'm trying to figure out my brain as well. It's so weird; not only is every brain's user manual uniquely different, every single one is also written in a different long-lost language. And so the reverse-engineering process has to come up both with the content and the language. It's so annoying. :)
As for my "big computer project"... I somehow got the idea that "I shall solve the UI problem!" (......woops). Over the past few years this has slowly (and initially painfully) morphed and rounded out into a general interest in psychology, human focus, the understated/unintuitive amounts of friction produced by network effects, and how hard it truly is to solve for holistic, cohesive design that allows us to reason about complex ideas in ways that are intuitively instinctive.
The OCD about UI design started around 2003. I think I was 12, heh. It took from around 2006 to 2011 to go from "I shall make a new terminal!" to "eeh... the only winning move is not to play" when I kind of properly integrated the significance of obsession ("I must figure this out now") vs true interest ("I want to figure this out properly"). Developmental delay is fascinating. I guess my big project (if I could sign off anything at this point) was, uhh, growing up.
I still remain interested in the field of UX design, and continue to reduce ideas to their basic building blocks that I can objectively use for parts on a regular basis. So far I have a few fairly boring ideas that I might be able to commercialize at some point (into a field that already exists, but could do with better integration); if that fails, I'll just go back to the drawing board and start again. One of the more relevant things I've learned thus far is that trying really hard to make something work "because it has potential", without being able to reason through that "potential" end-to-end, is something to avoid like the plague.
(As for school, that didn't quite work out, mostly due to process failures surrounding institutional incompetence.)
Also. I just gotta tell you what a metagon is. Because it's cool and simple.
A metagon is the essence of a polygon. It's the definition of a polygon minus information pertaining to location, orientation, scale and chirality (handedness).
hi conun long time listener first time caller here
question that I never got around to asking you when you were working on this: did the community meme about OII never being finished ever get to you? The line rider world is full of a lot of projects that never got completed (SamThePoor’s Cosmic Ultimatum, etc.). What kept you going on this, when so many other projects seemed to fizzle out, as the community kind of shrank and receded, before it really came back into the zeitgeist? I really respect the deliberation and thoroughness you take with each step when you start a project.
> did the community meme about OII never being finished ever get to you?
I've always found it really funny and played along with it!
> What kept you going on this
It was mostly my conviction about the creative potential of Line Rider but it helped a lot that the community remained alive and people understood the significance of this track
Chinese Democracy, Duke Nukem Forever... And now Omniverse II. I think as soon as Star Citizen is released, we can call this one a wrap and move on to the next universe.
Brilliant work! This game should be compulsory for all mechanical engineering students. It’s a good way to differentiate between function and ornamentation.
Heyo! I’m the other half of Line Rider Review, the video essay channel David mentions at the start of the article. I’m not quite the historian Bevibel is, but if you have any questions related to Line Rider or its history over the past decade, I’d be happy to provide additional context.
A lot has changed since I started doing Line Rider art in middle school (here’s an old one: https://youtu.be/h__96TEF85g and here’s more what I do these days: https://youtu.be/o2XMFgk3JQQ). Forcing myself to learn editing software in middle school eventually helped me land video editing gigs before I transitioned to software. Line Rider took me on a fun path to get there :)
David’s always been an innovator, and I love seeing his stuff show up in unexpected places (though HN is probably the least shocking place I’d find this article)
I remember the day Line Rider actually came out. I remember seeing it on Digg, and this was before Youtube but people were theorizing if a loopty loop would be possible (oh simpler line rider times!). I remember hacking something together into a (flash) video back then. I think I may still have it laying around somewhere.
EDIT: Yep, here it is, "Date Created: 9/23/2006" which is the day Line Rider came out according to wikipedia.
Youtube existed back then and for me line rider was a phenomenon that increased my use of it, one of my first liked videos was line rider jumps the shark, from 25sep2006. I remember watching many line rider videos back then.
I think the ability for humans to build seemingly straight-forward and simple tools or building blocks that other humans then go on to create insanely complex things like this with is what sets us apart from every other species in existence.
Funny coincidence, I was just reading "Sphere" by Michael Crichton, and the zoologist in the novel was presenting the same argument about the the intelligence of octopuses. Side-note, this book is driving me crazy, the characters seem to be the dumbest persons alive, although they supposed to be the smartest scientists.
> Octopus lifespan is limited by reproduction: males can live for only a few months after mating, and females die shortly after their eggs hatch. ... Octopus reproductive organs mature due to the hormonal influence of the optic gland but result in the inactivation of their digestive glands, typically causing the octopus to die from starvation. Experimental removal of both optic glands after spawning was found to result in the cessation of broodiness, the resumption of feeding, increased growth, and greatly extended lifespans.
For anyone looking for a serious answer, the 1977 experiment seems to have extended life for several months (which is almost double the lifespan in some species), before they died for another reason which was not explained.
What I gather is that the optic gland controls all hormone secretion, and although they were able to prevent the digestive system from being blocked by removing it, the same gland likely is necessary in other areas.
I really appreciate this line of thought. It can be easy to brush stuff like this off as frivolous, but when you look at it from a more primitive perspective, it really is amazing, and it truly seems to me like art
It has been said time and time again, but I'll reiterate that time spent having fun is not time wasted. While many of the hackernews readers would like to think that we are machines, we aren't. I'm sure you've wasted lots of time on certain things over the years, so why the snide comment?
I’d replace “having fun” with “doing something fulfilling”.
It has the same subjectivity but hits closer to why we regret some things and not others. Surfing is fun and fulfilling to me where cocaine is only fun but unfulfilling.
That the author wasted their time is purely your opinion, and really adds nothing to the conversation here. Why insult someone for doing something you don’t find interesting?
A lot of line rider folks get this kind of reaction. I truly think there’s some kind of insecurity that gets triggered in people when they see someone doing something intricate and esoteric with obvious passion.
Is it a jealousy at not finding such a passion, or for being unable to dedicate sufficient time to make something of a similar scale? Is it that they see such passion as wasted because the subject in question doesn’t match their own interest? Do they not believe it is deserving of the eyes that are on it now?
You can speculate, but at the end of the day, making something, and showing it to the world like this, is an extreme vulnerability. The act of making something is often as valuable as the result itself.
I do believe it is to some degree jealousy. Everybody understands the scarcity and power of passion; what’s work for some is love for others. When you compound a lack of passion, insecurity and bad human character, it’s not surprising to have reactions similar to purplecats’ above.
Line Rider can be a source of income. My Line Rider Review cohost Bevibel, the creator of the 50-minute full-album track This Will Destroy you (ref https://youtu.be/qasxqKScOfY), does commissions full time in addition to their personal projects. Sometimes it’s small clients, sometimes it’s Disney. Helped them out with a music video for Guster once after the band saw a track they had already made to one of their songs. It’s a fun niche market.
Agreed. It's not an innate intelligence that makes us stand out. It's our capacity to share our intelligence and build upon solutions from friends, parents, and many generations of ancestors.
Not quite the same, but this reminds of defrag from various quake games (mostly quake 3 and variations). The idea of strafe jumping being in the original quake (well circle jumping more like which is kind of different) started as a bug based on how acceleration works in quake that was used to basically fly through maps and became a central part of movement in the game. Of course, in addition there was the more well known rocket jumping where you use the force of weapons as a means to accelerate. Later, people made entire maps that require mastering this movement, a little bit like parkour, and it developed into a game mode that had very large and intricate maps that require a lot of skill to complete.
Starsiege: Tribes is even closer to line rider in spirit. It came out just before Quake 3. It has massive (many km^2) outdoor maps with rolling hills and jetpacks. Early in the alpha the devs and the users figured out that by spamming jump while going down a hill you could "ski" and pick up speed the jet up the next hill to maintain. This bug, skiing, became the central element of the game. And because Tribes allowed client side scripting in a c++ like language you could just use a "jump script" to efficiently ski.
Eventually people were building line-rider style FPS maps for skiing starting around 1999.
Nowadays I play an open source fps called xonotic which is more or less UT and quake 3 mixed together with a heavy emphasis on motion, and a lot of people in the community have recommended I try Tribes as well actually as they have similar focus on movement.
That is fascinating. It reminds me of the games I used to play when I was younger. I remember playing COD4 back in the day and "strafing" being an important part of the gameplay. Another thing that every pro player did was reload animation cancelling. It allowed one to rapid fire snipers.
COD4 also had serverside mod support where upon connecting to a dedicated server, the client could choose to download these mods from the server. It was crazy what the community was able to come up with.
These days... well, surprisingly not so much has changed. Even though the official multiplayer servers have long gone dark, the original COD4 on PC still has a community and player base. Its remastered version that came out recently on the other hand is pretty much dead.
That reminded me of OSP Rocket Olympics, a Quake 2 mod based around rocket jumping skills. Was fun playing that on lan parties: https://www.orangesmoothie.org/rocketo/
I think because of this bug Counter-Strike also had the same long-jump/bunny-hopping strafing thing, so HNS was born. CS 1.6 HNS is by far the game I had most fun with.
After casually watching the progression from SWF, to Silverlight, to some overdone version on the Wii, it gives me warm fuzzy feelings that linerider.com is still hosting a down-to-earth
(albeit modern) version.
I remember backing up the SWF version of line rider. And then they added a STRAIGHT LINE tool. No more abusing the right click menu! How far this game has come!
> After years of development, after some more collaboration with that Line Rider friend, and after connecting with the owners of Line Rider, it wound up becoming the official version on linerider.com. This version resolved many of the issues I had with the original version
I'm so curious to hear more about this. That's like a geek dream come true.
The history of LR is complicated! It was originally created in Flash by Boštjan Čadež who sold it to InXile. InXile made the versions in Silverlight and the overdone versions on Wii, DS, and PC, but they all flopped and they did nothing with LR for years. And that's where I came in: while I was remaking LR in Javascript (intentionally down-to-earth) I brought my friend onto the project and he had a contact at InXile and got us connected with them. We figured out an agreement and eventually (we were novice developers at the time!) got our version (well now it's just me, my friend left the project) onto linerider.com. Then InXile gave LR back to Boštjan so now it's basically completely indie again!
Fun fact: InXile got acquired by Microsoft, and for a brief period of time, Microsoft technically owned LR
If I may critique this, there were some parts that didn't work for me (the ribbon section the most [1]), and some of the words and other parts went by way too quickly to figure out what was going on: it would have been nicer to slow down and appreciate the scenery more in that time. The ending is also rather abrupt; the music really felt to me like it wanted a denouement after the climax instead of just... ending.
That said... holy crap that final sequence was amazing, easily making up for whatever issues I have with other parts of it.
[1] Mostly due to the "moving too fast to get a sense of the scene" problem, I think.
Incredibly amazing. You should have presented this to the Assembly (in Finland) Wild Compo. You would have won for sure. Your artwork is incredible, for me the part after "Danger!" was awesome to see :) And the twirling braids at the end were so cool.
Wow this brought back a ton of memories of playing Line Rider and watching videos of amazing tracks on YouTube. My friends and I spent countless hours playing this in school, though my interest in it far outlasted theirs.
Line Rider was (is) such a great avenue for artistic and tinkering spirit. Someone else here called it a "demoscene" and that's a perfect comparison. It's a very easy game and community to get sucked into.
This track is pretty cool, and that ending is incredible. Nice to read that you were able to come back to a revived community and finish the project. I guess I'll go watch all my favorite tracks now, thanks :)
As an aside, it's great to see many here on HN who also love(d) this game. Not that I'm surprised the two communities would overlap, but there were at least a few years between the last time I built a track and the first time I came to HN. There are such strong common threads of interest across the internet.
If you are like me and had never heard of Line Rider before and so didn't understand why people are freaking out over a simple line animation, head on over here:
Not only is this an impressive work of art and quite a feat, the write up is thorough and one of the best things I've read all year. Wow.
The post is full of life lessons and details the struggles of being an artist and engineer. Leave the flash game out of this, and it's _still_ a great write up.
This made my day. The passion, work, but also completeness that you get blasted in your face is amazing! (amazing to the point where I re-watched it a few times, on the big screen as well)
> After years of development, after some more collaboration with that Line Rider friend, and after connecting with the owners of Line Rider, it wound up becoming the official version on linerider.com. This version resolved many of the issues I had with the original version
This really caught me off guard. What an unexpected twist.
I have so much respect for people who take their projects this far and I love this mix of programming, art, and overall geekery!
I've been in touch with David on-and-off since college and I gotta say, he's been passionate about this as long as I've known him, he's extremely talented, and he's always working on fantastic, creative projects. I'm really excited to see this post on HN.
I was confused about why some of the black lines are solid and some, the guy just passes through. So I read a bunch of Line Rider tutorials, but they said the only possible colors for lines are red, blue, and green, and now I'm even more confused.
Line rider is full of bugs. Very fun and useful bugs. Going fast enough or at the right angle or nearby something or ... will let you clip through things, accelerate uphill, spin instead of moving, etc.
The red, green, and blue lines are those colors when editing, so you know what type they are. When you hit "play" and are viewing the rider ride the lines, all lines are black.
Seeing David’s passion for line rider over the years has been nothing short of inspiring. He’s a mathematical genius who brings that to play across everything from music to line rider to software. Can’t wait to see what they build next!
Is the game going to survive Flash's imminent end of life?
I spent way more time than I want to admit playing my favorite Flash game, Fantastic Contraption. I'm concerned that the possibly millions of hours of creativity that went into the thousands of levels and hundreds of thousands of solutions are going to go down with that ship in a couple months.
I guess the internet archive is working on supporting older games but I wonder how feature complete and bug-free that's likely to be
This is art. I’m always impressed with people who use what might be considered sub-optimal tools to create with. I remember reading about some guy who paints by changing the colors of cells in Excel. Mind blowing.
Here’s another fun Line Rider video synced to “Something Just Like This / Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2” by the piano guys: https://youtu.be/mZd1GsRHVts
Awesome perseverance! As someone who has worked on a project for many years, I understand the fits and starts.
When I hear about most businesses failing I think about that saying: "Quitting smoking is the easiest thing I've ever done. I've done it a thousand times!"
Temporarily giving up is like a superposition of success and failure. It hasn't collapsed into true failure until you stop working on something for the last time.
Wow it's amazing to see true art and deep complexity turn up places you would have never expected it; like discovering the depths of Conway's Game of Life, fractal art, origami... Where you spot something, go "huh, that's neat", then proceed to discover that there is a world of enthusiasts, technical jargon, wikis, competitions, etc. all hiding in plain sight.
Off topic, but it made me flash on something I spent many, many hours on probably 20 years ago, that I can't quite recollect. Does anyone remember the flash experience where you created little creatures out of lines and springs and they kind of hobbled around? I believe "soda" was in the name. That thing really got me into computers and the web!
Amazing. I don’t pretend to understand this world at all, but I will say the stairway to heaven equivalent appears to be this seven minute track with surprisingly good theme music.
Amazing! This reminds me of a track I made for Action Super Cross / Elastomania, where every quirk in the engine was used. I had to simplify a lot of objects because I hit the max number of polygons all the time. I have to see if I can find that masterpiece somewhere :)
Have to admire the dedication you've put into that. Us casual line-riders spent a few hours at best and moved on onto the next shiny thing and there's there people like you that went above and beyond. A labour of love.
Personal attacks will get you banned on HN so please don't post like this. If you'd read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit to heart, we'd appreciate it. Note this one: Be kind.
Ehhh, there are no good uses of time, therefore no bad ones. We're all just here killing time and telling ourselves it means something. Meaning is arbitrary. Corollary: You can find meaning anywhere.
