Wow, this is clever. And for once, it's cleverly weird in a way that is interesting to play.
Not only do you have to deal with playing two games of breakout at once, but the same mouse controls two paddles simultaneously, but at different scales.
The interesting challenge is when the two balls are briefly in sync but you can't hit them at once. You have to move the window paddle up so you hit its ball earlier, then go and get the tiny ball. Easier said than done though...
A desert traveller is searching for water. He sees, in the valley ahead, a shimmering blue expanse. Unfortunately, it’s a mirage. But fortunately, when he reaches the spot where there appeared to be water, there actually is water, hidden under a rock. Did the traveller know, as he stood on the hilltop hallucinating, that there was water ahead?
Once I changed half my working code ( and wasted an Hour of time ) before realising that I was testing different code. On the other hand, now newer code had 10 times more testing points.
I'm going to say no, he didn't know. But I don't think I can properly articulate why which just get me into trouble with an even more nuanced variant of that question.
Let me illustrate a probable story which might muddy the waters and expand the surface area of belief.
Consider a woman whose child is suffering from a disease. She has gone to all the doctors she was recommended and found no success. She is told to visit Church and pray to Jesus. After the sunday mass, she tells her story to few random church goers. They immediately recognize the medical condition and tell her to visit a particular doctor. Doctor sees her child and provides medication. Her child is cured after few years. Now the question is did she know going to church would solve her medical problems?
That one is clear to me too, also no. How would she know? No where did you specify that she even thought going to church would solve her problems. She was told to visit church, yes, but there has to be a belief component to "knowing". Did she genuinely believe going to church would solve her medical problems? Hope and desperation don't count either, it has to be a genuine belief. Also, she was told be pray to Jesus. Depending on if you're religious or not you might say that Jesus did cure her, but a pretty strong argument could be made that the church-goers were the key, so even if she did believe Jesus would cure her, if it ends up being something else, then it also doesn't count.
There is clear chain of links : Belief (Jesus solves problems) -> Action (Going to church) -> Finding solution (Other church goers helped her). How is this different than original gettier problem? In original gettier problem, his problem was solved in unexpected ways.
As I see it, there are four quadrants : 2 (action, no action) x 2 (solution, no solution). You can build any story based on outcomes.
Which makes me glad I am using wayland. I am not comfortable with the idea that one browser window could be aware of things like the position of another browser window on my desktop.
The browser doesn’t communicate such things between unrelated clients, say, on different domains. The browser does allow a site to communicate with the popup that it opened, which is what this game is doing, and is not problematic.
Yes, you can access window.screenX for your own window, but not for other windows. If you’re writing code for an iframe embedded into a domain that’s not yours, your code does not have access to the parent’s windows.screenX.
Firefox knows where all its windows are, of course, but that’s not the potential issue being raised. The problem is allowing untrusted javascript access to that info. Luckily, Firefox doesn’t do that, it only allows you (JavaScript author) window information for the windows you’ve directly opened in code.
Actually I don't think Firefox knows the position of the window in Wayland. I thought that coordinates of windows were considered as a compositor concern and not shared with the client.
Better even: the parent window knows the position of it's child window. So firefox only knows the one window. And that in a situation where you actively had to allow the permission for the parent to spawn the child in the first place.
so you have KDE on top of Qt on top of Wayland on top of Firefox -> are you running wayland in Firefox? if yes, you might run Firefox in Wayland instead of xorg to have some further *ception
This game is so silly it makes me laugh. It works great on Windows 10. I don't have that fancy trimmed chrome titlebar just the regular box style.
It reminds me of a program my brother wrote in high school that would spawn invading spaceships (Java Triangles) onto your desktop and they would bonk your mouse around.
Meanwhile, I was in the corner of the lab playing Starcraft.
If this gives you an appetite for more block-breaking, check out Pippin Barr's BREAKSOUT, a collection of 36 wacky variants of Breakout: https://pippinbarr.com/breaksout/info/
I think it might be a Xorg vs. Wayland thing rather than browser version. IIRC Wayland does not report coordinates of the window relative to screenspace.
Cool concept. As a reviewer said - if you get into the flow it's interesting. But the chunkiness of the controls kinda ruins the experience and make it harder than necessary to get into that flow.
It seems like the "right" side of a paddle always increases the speed, while the "left" side of the paddle always decreases the speed.
This behavior should be direction dependent: ie: the left-side of the paddle should push the ball to the left, while the right-side of the paddle should push the ball to the right. Classic breakout controls.
For the first 2 or 3 games, I thought you couldn't control the speed. I was wrong, its just that the speed-control in this game is very small (it requires about 6 or 7 bounces to go from minimum speed to max speed), while also having a very non-intuitive speed/direction control scheme for the paddle.
I love it, OP. Really creative take on the original game and this is a totally unique use of windows as an input. It's smart on many levels.
I wonder if this game could be used as a benchmark for alternating attention (switching between tasks.) People with disorders like ADHD and others that effect executive function are supposed to have difficulty with this. So it would be interesting to see if ones score increased off medication vs on medication. Or even if a healthy person saw an increase with stimulants.
Psychologists love games like this because it lets them study isolated aspects of cognition in a standardized way. It's honestly a cool project.
I tried changing the size of the smaller window, and it worked briefly to allow the ball to bounce off the now-larger size, before the game snapped the window size back to the original.
It made me think that changing the window could be part of the game somehow. Perhaps as you drag it bigger the playing field of the smaller game increases in width, so that game becomes harder (and also you can't move the paddle as far because your new window is too big to drag).
Or maybe you should be able to capture the ball in the big window into the smaller window, and the size and position of the smaller window determines its entry point.
The ball in the lower window only bounces off the browser's chrome and not the title bar. This is making the game harder than it could be (and possibly an unfixable problem?).
Also I have wobbly windows and that makes the game hard too.
This could just be crazy, given that brick walls may be composed of various types of bricks that break with various numbers of hits and also given that the walls will have various shapes depending on which bricks you break first.
This drastically changes the game in the sense that as a player, you can't decide precisely which bricks of the opponent you break (as opponents move their walls): you have some influence on which one of your bricks you break and you most fundamental goal is to make sure that the ball just bounces against your own paddle/wall to send it back and not lose a life.
And the more you touch the ball with your paddle, the more the paddle's size shrinks (because of all the broken bricks), which contributes to make the game harder for you and might give your adversary some chance to come back.
That's a terrific idea, even without the brickception (just a simple brick-wall-paddle).
This is absolutely wonderful! I didn't think it would work with my setup (bspwm and Firefox 115), but it did. I consider myself pretty good with these kinds of games, but this really does take Breakout to a new dimension, with a difficulty to match!
Hard crashes Chrome for me (all windows instantly disappear on pressing 'LAUNCH GAME') - Chrome beta (120.0.6099.35) on Wayland (not using X) on Ubuntu 23.04. I wasn't expecting it to work due to Wayland, but the crash was impressive!
It works with my sway setup [1], but only on Chromium, not Librewolf. I'm pretty sure it's just a Librewolf/FF issue, since it seems to open pop-ups in new tabs, not as windows.
I had a similar idea using two windows for a game.
One large window with an overview map and a popup window you can move around as a magnifying lens that shows details and lets you interact.
Hitting the last brick was the worst. Instead of pausing the top maybe swap the playing fields so I have more control over the paddle/ball? It took over 2 minutes just to hit one brick in the smaller one
It's a copy of someone else doing exactly the same thing (2 layers of breakout played by moving window) but in C++ (which the author credits) both years before the following. Although the general concept of having games creatively use windows is probably much older. I assume it showed up now because of recent trend of people rediscovering that this concept works in (some) browsers and making various non breakout variations of it of it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38413660
Don't worry, I get it. I just think it's a bit daft that the title is now so thoroughly associated with a fairly mechanical part of how the film functions, when it's not only a pre-existing word but also refers to a much more significant idea within the film itself. Plus, the 'rick' of 'brick' sounds a bit like the 'rec' of 'recursion'.
But I think I was a bit harsh in this case, the way the two parts of the game interact is more reminiscent of the dream layers in the film than is often the case with such Inception references.
Thank you. This *ception misuse is annoying. Conception is the act of creating an idea. Inception is the point at which something is conceived. The movie created a fake verb form that means "to induce a conception." None of this is conceptually related to the nested dreams in the movie.
No, we haven’t decided that inception is synonymous with recursion, but even if we had, lots and lots of words have always had multiple meanings, and meanings that come and go, and meanings that change over time. Language is fluid and is defined by its usage and not by static prescription, which is one of the fun aspects of language. Embrace it and enjoy the ride! ;)
Not only do you have to deal with playing two games of breakout at once, but the same mouse controls two paddles simultaneously, but at different scales.
The interesting challenge is when the two balls are briefly in sync but you can't hit them at once. You have to move the window paddle up so you hit its ball earlier, then go and get the tiny ball. Easier said than done though...