I hate almost all games for this need to advance, earn levels, die and start over, compete and score. One of very few games I played when I was young was Test Drive 4*, where I would simply drive around and play, switching wipers on and off. I liked sports cars games, but I would often go backwards or wonder off the track, if game permitted. Also.. Neverhood. And creative mode in Minecraft.
> hate almost all games for this need to advance, earn levels, die and start over, compete and score
One of the only games I've truly enjoyed for a long time is SimCity. I learned this genre is sometimes called "idle games".
> What differentiates idle games from other types of game systems is that they can progress without player input. When players do engage, they tinker with a system, rather than encountering a confrontation that they can win or lose.
> Idle games invites players to participate in the game world, but does not revolve around them. You are, essentially, not a center of the world but a spectator.
> I learned this genre is sometimes called "idle games".
That is very interesting. With "idle games" idea of playing games may be stretched to all different spaces of interacting with the computer/program, touching on learning, relaxation, ideation. Well... food for thought.
> Neverhood looks fun! Love the claymation art.
Neverhood is unique with its aesthetics as it was created with real, huge set made of real clay and cameras recording character walking.
Cool! I enjoyed watching the making of Neverhood. Fascinating how they created a world from literally a ton and a half of clay, then turned it into interactive entertainment. And how Steven Spielberg was involved, bringing together a team of artists, musicians, programmers, crafts people.
Love the physicality/materiality of clay, like one person said, how it has finger prints. Creatures and their environment all made by hand. I have a feeling, as society becomes more digitized and virtualized, people are missing the tactile sensation of touching real things. It might lead to a revival of interest in hand-made crafts, and material objects made of wood, ceramics, wool..
> With "idle games" idea of playing games may be stretched to all different spaces of interacting with the computer/program, touching on learning, relaxation, ideation.
The paper I linked above has made me curious about the concept of "idle games", and related topics like "gamification" of education, work, and life routines.
I realized, Stardew Valley is a famous example of an idle game without competition, winning or losing. I haven't played it, but I imagine it's a pleasant experience.
Glad you liked it. I feel it also shows amazing atmosphere and spirit of people involved and this is what attracts us. You know, like backstage of Fraggle Rock or The Muppet Show.
I will definitely read the paper / explore the idea of 'idle games'. Thx again.
This is one of the allures of Forza Horizon for me. On the surface, it's an MMRPG, with social, collection, crafting, levels, puzzles, competition, et al, all of that can be turned off / ignored as desired.
With those items off, it's a great place to "drive" around, with different climates, seasons, amazing views, etc. Drive a classic convertible along a beachfront road. Explore dirt roads in an SUV during a snow storm.
It's no driving simulator, but it's a pleasant way to get away from the world for a while. If you've got the winter blahs and like driving / scenery, plug your PC or Xbox into the biggest display you have and get away for a while.
I used to do this on Total Drivin’ on PS1. There were all sorts of ledges and off-track locations you could get yourself onto if you drove off track in the right way, sometimes even wall driving. Many, many hours.
This was fun. I kept trying to "throw" the sand and use a forward momentum to the falling sand, but that doesn't work. No matter the speed of the mouse's movement, the falling particles always fall straight down. Otherwise I liked it enough that I am saving it for my next conference call as you've suggested
Have you tried Kerbal Space Program? My son and I love to just roam around exploring, and trying to build different rockets and airplanes. We're just not interesting in the game, but the exploration is amazing. It is also a terrific learning tool.
This has vibes of the old Web, where amazing and niche things were happening. Apparently that engine is written in something called Haxe and its multi-platform.
Sometimes I wonder what I'm missing out by looking at lists curated by points given out by people who come together by hyper specialised interests. Should have heard of it before hearing about the millionth JS framework.
Haxe can compile to even more targets these days, like C++, JVM, C#, PHP, Lua, etc. It also includes an interpreter to run without compiling, and there’s a newer, faster VM for Haxe called HashLink.
I see, it pops up every few months but most of the time it appears that doesn't get any traction with exception of a few times in the last 10 years. Interesting case, at glance I think it should be getting more love than it has.
Three.js is just a rendering engine -- it wouldn't allow you to create something like this anyway.
Also, I don't believe that the bubble toy is related to their physics engine; it seems like a different type of physics. The engine is focused on 3D collisions, joints, springs, etc., whereas the bubble toy is simulating thin films.
I wish there was source code for the bubble toy so we could see how it works!
That caught me off-guard as well. I only ever written one thing in Haxe, but the experienced was mixed. It worked, but it also kind of painful to work with.
For context: Haxe is a programming language with the main purpose to have several compile targets for many programming languages.
Old Version
Written in ActionScript 3.0
Supports spheres and boxes as collision shapes
Supports various joints (ball and socket, distance, hinge, prismatic, etc...)
Fast and stable collision solver
I made a small tribute[0] to Winterbells last year when beginning to learn Godot. Spent much time with that music on loop way back when playing that cozy game!
That stung me hard. Damn, Orisinal. I spent so much time playing those wonderful games on rainy afternoons with a tea pot. I had a dinky little Sony VAIO laptop, they were called "Netbooks" at the time around 2005. It was bliss.
Delightful toys like this are why I love the web. I'd never go through the rigamarole of installing an app to play with this, but I sure will click a link.
While everyone's loving the bubble physics, I just like the attention to detail where if you put the fan _in front_ of the bubble blower facing away from it, it will still blow bubbles in that direction if the air stream would still be drawn through the blower.
Such a fun surprise when I realized that the fan does not only push air but pulls air in as well. The bubble wand placed to the left of the fan will still make bubbles out the right hand side. Interestingly it makes bigger bubbles than normal.
Though strangely, it seems to disable all of my browser keyboard shortcuts. Even basic ones like going back, selecting the address bar, or changing the zoom level. I assume it's just listening for all key events, though I didn't even realize it was possible to override the basic ones.
edit: I found the bug! It has a list that's supposed to contain all possible keycodes, and if all the keys in your shortcut are on it that list it works. But I'm on macOS so my shortcuts all involve the "MetaLeft" or "MetaRight" key and those are missing from the list. Appending those keycodes to the minified array named `ba.G` fixes shortcuts for me!
Many years ago there was a viral web-based game involving...shooting frogs, perhaps?
The mechanics were not explained, you had to discover how to play it.
The problem: the primary mechanism was pointer clicks, but the Mac's tap to click didn't work.
So the game was in motion but nothing I did made any difference. I even wondered if perhaps the virality was a joke: the people who knew it didn't actually work were playing a trick on everyone else.
Anyway, I guess the moral of the story is that forcing the user to discover the mechanics works better when you control the full stack.
Or that those of us who cherish tap to click should occasionally press harder, just in case.
I'm still grappling with my last bout of "holy moly is the universe a simulation?" after reading about a way of dealing with latency in networked games that looks a lot like relativity.
These are magical little apps. I’ve spent a good while looking for these types of projects. It’s like coming across a gold nugget. Here is a site I’ve found with some amazing apps that are really fun to interact with. https://www.abowman.com/
what I like about this is that that air is particle system. and so are bubbles are made of elastic strings. in a sense there is no bubbles here, it is interaction of particles, and bubbles and air wind is emergent property
I absolutely love this and am curious about the technical details behind simulating soap bubbles like this (it looks like the code isn't available). Does anyone know what algorithm is being used?
Their physics engine doesn't seem related to the bubble toy as far as I can tell (although another HN comment implies it is). The physics engine implements 3D collisions between solid objects, joints, springs, etc. But the bubble toy is a different type of physics.
I love the fluid design on the "works" page as it resizes to the browser. Putting physics into your resize algorithm really shows a lot of care and attention.
Haxe is an awesome project that's been around for ages... I last looked at it as a potential replacement for AIR/AS3 a decade ago but the GPU capabilities weren't there yet with OpenFL. Seems like it's time to take a new look!
It didn't work (I think? It was just a white screen). I tried changing IP with CTRL+SHIFT+L and it wasn't doing anything, then tried copying the link and opening in a different window, but it wouldn't copy (because I used CTRL+L). Only then I realized it just doesn't let you press any button on the keyboard. JESUS CHRIST never show me this link again.
I spent wayyy too much time playing with this, just trying to understand all the dynamics. What makes the bubbles burst, or merge, or collapse, or partially burst and partially expand a connected bubble.
The impact of the various directions of the fan or pin.
I agree that this is a true work of art. The variation and attention to detail is delightful. I hope more people put together and share stuff like this on HN.
context - it's an old-skool (Victorian era?) song that has been adopted by West Ham football club, and I guess some fans recorded a version of it here :)
Fun fact: if you zoom out a ton, place the bubble machine at the outside edge, and then zoom back in to standard, you get a crap ton of bubbles very quickly
12 years have passed since Steve Jobs killed Flash and finally people can make some decent interactive Web animations which correctly works on latest browsers.
Funny enough this project is a descendent of the flash lineage – it's written in haxe which first existed as an alternative ActionScript compiler. It's since evolved to be a strong functionally focused language of its own and perfect for writing games and interactives like this and now exports js instead. There's even a project (OpenFL) to preserve the old APIs!.
A good example of how haxe has evolved since AS2, the author (saharan) has written their own shader language _in_ haxe which they've used in this project. Haxe has a compile-time macro engine which you can develop DSLs to improve your workflow
https://github.com/saharan/HGSL
I remember some impressive native demos of platform games 12 years ago. Did the Flash to HTML5 converter work well? I never migrated my own "masterpieces"
With the abundance of software around I'm pretty sure that the're plenty of GUI authoring tools. According to quick Googling I can see that there's Adobe Animate which is successor of Adobe Flash and it supports HTML5 output.
I don't think that asking from modern software to work on Pentium 3 is reasonable. Software should work on a reasonable percentage of user computers. Pentium 3 is definitely outside of this definition. You didn't ask for Flash to work on 8086, did you? I'd expect it to be a challenge to even run Google Chrome on Pentium 3.
A game has a goal. Here you are free to experiment without being led or nudged. In the world of computer-based entertainment, it is refreshing.