8 ms·
Swarmation: like musical chairs for pixels
[Created this weekend as part of Node Knockout.]
- camwest 16y agoWow I can't believe how FUN this is. Edit: I just realized no one is commenting because everyone is still busy playing it.
- SandB0x 16y agoYes, this game is absolute genius. Felt really sorry for the guy (X) who got stuck running around in the middle of the Fortress formation a minute ago. Like: ##### #X # # # # # # ##### I'm the one in the blue, by the way. Edit: This makes me think about mathematical morphology^, used in image processing. You win when you are inside the opening of the set of pixels by the given structuring element. i.e. you win when you are in any place where the shape can fit. ^ http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rbf/HIPR2/open.htm http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rbf/HIPR2/open.htm
- giantfuzzypanda 16y agoEveryone's own square appears blue.
- DaemonXI 16y agoThank you, panda. That was the joke.
- v21 16y agoYaay, Bob Fisher! I once dressed as him for a party, with a cardboard cutout of his face over my face. I'm sorry, this comment isn't strictly relevant, but I don't get a chance to tell that story very often.
- sciolistse 16y agoIt's really made me realize how irritated i can get by gray blocks moving out of formation.
- ollerac 16y agohave you managed to complete the lobster formation yet? i'm starting to think it might be impossible
- Groxx 16y agoI love how reliable everyone is when Block comes up. WHERE WERE YOU WHEN I ALMOST HAD LOBSTER?! addicting. edit: hmm. I think the match-algorithm is a bit too forgiving. Several of the forms can be "solved" by just clumping together. Though, given how many are still missed, maybe that's not a bad thing.
- caryme 16y agoAfter playing for a while, I think the best strategy is to simply not move.
- shrikant 16y agoThat's quite a WOPR of a discovery..
- obsessive1 16y agoI love how I have no idea what is going on or what to do, yet it still keeps telling me I win.
- kapitalx 16y agoYeah found myself in the same situation. Or sometimes I was part of the pattern that matched, and I didn't win. I think this is just a bug and they'll probably fix it soon.
- CytokineStorm 16y agoThanks for all the feedback. This was my entry in the Node knockout competition, along with @ollerac and @steadicat. This app was built using the awesome sockets.io library which made it simple to send realtime messages without dealing with cross-browser compatibility issues. Really the server's only job is to pass messages back and forth between the clients, who do all the work of detecting the formations and updating the other players when they move.
- mcantelon 16y agoNice... I noticed that, unlike a number of other Node Knockout entries, it worked fine in Firefox. Will have to try that lib.
- steadicat 16y agoWhat I find amazing is how much fun people are having with it despite the fact that we had no idea what the game mechanics would be until the last minute. We basically started with a board of pixels, and everything else just evolved through testing and laziness ("what's the simplest thing we can do to make the game slightly less pointless?").
- hendler 16y agoCongrats guys. I really enjoyed - the fact that it is playable (technically and interactively) and built in a weekend shows vision and focus.
- Rauchg_ 16y agoReally happy to see socket.io working for you guys. As someone mentioned, not only should it enable WebSocket for Firefox, but also IE6-8, iPad, iPhone, Android, WebOS, Safari 3, and others (even if connected through cross-domain) Some other projects from the knockout leveraging it: http://swarmation.com http://swarmation.com http://maprejuice.com/ http://maprejuice.com/ http://demiox-boiko.no.de/ http://demiox-boiko.no.de/ http://piston-hurricane.no.de/ http://piston-hurricane.no.de/ http://nodelicious.no.de/ http://nodelicious.no.de/ http://virtual-design.no.de/ http://virtual-design.no.de/ http://inflatable-chum.no.de/ http://inflatable-chum.no.de/ http://fragnut.me/ http://fragnut.me/ http://braintree.no.de/ http://braintree.no.de/ http://nodty.no.de/ http://nodty.no.de/ http://tweetquestgame.com http://tweetquestgame.com http://speedo.no.de/ http://speedo.no.de/ http://piratetron.com/ http://piratetron.com/ http://error-500.no.de http://error-500.no.de
- brown9-2 16y agoIt took me a few minutes to realize I was playing this game with other people, nice work.
- chrismealy 16y agoThis is fantastic. What a great demonstration of the limits of self-organization!
- st0p 16y agoIndeed it is fantastic, But I was more surprised about the powers of self-organization than the limits of it!
- chrismealy 16y agoYou haven't tried to make the hat!
- chrischen 16y agoYou should add a leaderboard.
- ollerac 16y agowe plan to after node.js ko is over
- mrduncan 16y agoFascinating. What has been most interesting to me is to watch the game as more and more people join. When I first started watching, there were about 30 or so pixels was swarming around the middle of the board - now, there are three distinct swarms in different areas of the board, each comprised of about 20-30 pixels.
- xtacy 16y agoThis looks very cool! Can someone point me to a place which lists a collection of useful HTML5 tools/libraries to build stuff like these? Thanks!
- CytokineStorm 16y agoA good place to start is http://html5boilerplate.com/ http://html5boilerplate.com/. This provides a good starting point and includes the modernizr library by default, which makes it very easy to check for compatibility with HTML5 features like canvas, video/audio tags and websockets. Dive into HTML5 by Mark Pilgrim has also been a helpful reference for me.
- Qz 16y agothe blue pixel doesn't show up for me on firefox after the first time i go to the page (aka cant play anymore)
- simplify 16y agoHere's a fun idea: split players up into multiple teams i.e. only pixels of the same team can make formations, and points are awarded to each team as a whole
- hartror 16y agoThis had me smiling in seconds, love it so much!
- 0x5a177 16y agoI don't remember ever playing a game this simple that made me start giggling.
- mcgraw 16y agoFor some reason when I start the game I lose connection with everyone after 5 or so seconds (all pixels are at a stand-still after they had been moving). The counter continues to count down as well. Despite the problems it is pretty slick. Win 7, Firefox 3.6.8.
- ollerac 16y agoi think firefox 4.0 will have support for websockets but until then we have to rely on fall-backs provided by the socket.io library. although i successfully tested this game in firefox 3.6, i suggest you try chrome or safari for a better experience.
- TheEzEzz 16y agoVery cool. Occasional bug: I found myself 'winning' even when I was clearly not part of a pattern (sometimes even totally separated). Running Vista Chrome.
- ollerac 16y agoya, this is one of the top bugs we want to fix. thanks
- jamram82 16y agoProbably the first collaborative multiplayer game without any element of communication.
- ollerac 16y agois this a good thing? we were considering adding the ability to chat as a special power, but i kind of like the simplicity/anonymity of the current setup
- roryokane 16y agoThere is a little bit of communication. For instance, if you want to lead someone somewhere, you can try running circles around them and then running in a direction, and then running back to them. I don’t know if they would understand, but you could try.
- Ayjay 16y agoYou should have your colour change when you reach certain point thresholds - when you "level up" I guess. Also, maybe then you can push lower-level pixels around? -- Ayjay on Fedang
- ww520 16y agoHow do you play this game? Nothing works for me. I press left/right/up/down but nothing happens.
- trafficlight 16y agoTry Chrome. Firefox 4 doesn't work for me.
- dschobel 16y agowow, and there's a group making swastikas in the corner. classy.
- oldgregg 16y agoThis is SWEEET. My requests 1) Leaderboard: show the top 10 players plus my rank. Much more incentive to keep playing. 2) Tag the leader with some kind of color. 3) Bring a little more structure. No idea how to do this. If people call it Web 3.0 I'll shoot myself in the face, but I think there's really something about this whole realtime web.
- roryokane 16y agoYou really should make it clearer that this is against other humans. When I saw the page, I thought the other pixels were just automatons. Even when I saw some forming letters in the corner, I just thought “interesting, some of them are programmed to not participate”. And I thought moving around was pointless because I couldn’t predict where the computer would move its pixels, so I had no idea how to get into position but to just stand there. It was only by reading these comments that I realized that the other pixels were other players, which increased my enjoyment of the game immensely because of the feeling of cooperation with others, and the understanding of why the other pixels act the way they do.
- aaronblohowiak 16y agoagainst or with?
- igravious 16y agoSabateours spring to mind. They stay in place right til the end and then move one pixel away. Aaaaaargh!
- po 16y agoThose aren't saboteurs… I believe scoring is done on the client side so they got the point and are rushing to do the next shape. They either need to do scoring server side, or there needs to be some sort of locking.
- steadicat 16y agoI’m actually quite proud of having implemented the scoring client-side. It helps keep the load on the server down. Looking up all possible formations is somewhat computationally intensive. It does create some problems when some clients have high latency and don't detect the formation in time, but I think it's fixable. One way could be to make the computation redundant, e.g. get three pixels to do the detection instead of one, and consider the formation valid if 2 out of 3 of them report success.
- exit 16y agowhere did you host this?
- steadicat 16y agoThis is on one of the SmartMachines that Joyent donated to the Node Knockout competition. We’ve been very impressed with it. Very easy deployment, and the server's been chugging along smoothly since launch (save the occasional restart due to invalid HTTP requests crashing some of our Node.js libs). The Joyent guys have also been tweeting network graphs for our app, which makes us comfortable that they're keeping a watchful eye on our instance for us: http://skitch.com/jimpick/dwjfw/flow-saber-tooth-moose-lion0.png-png-image-497x179-pixels http://skitch.com/jimpick/dwjfw/flow-saber-tooth-moose-lion0... :)
- agravier 16y agoAfter a few games (1 to 5), new formations stop showing up and other players stop moving. Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100724 Firefox/3.6.8
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- donaq 16y agoUh, block fits all patterns.
- igravious 16y agoIt's a tough one though. They need to ignore some random pixels but then again making a giant block shape is a loophole. Maybe calculate match as a percentage of the pixels that would be blank? Dunno. Tricky but doable :)
- manveru 16y agoWell, it's easy to get almost every formation, just open 30 tabs or so and move them all into a square. Unfortunately this game eats CPU like mad.
- cturner 16y agoMany thanks for this. It's a joy to play. I'm surprised by how good the vibe is in the game. I think there's a bug with the Y pattern - it never gets recognised in the games I participate in. It would be nice if you could get a reward at a thousand points - for example - being able to write a message.
- igravious 16y agoUh. Awesome. Best thing on the net in ages. Feature request: 1) Leaderboard (all scores periodically reset? countdown to reset?) 2) Top scorers colour-coded. 3) Ability for my fellow pixels to hear me swearing at the top of my lungs at them.
- ANH 16y agoThis is alarmingly addictive. Only problem was it took me about a minute to figure out my browser window was too small to see the target shape, so I had almost no idea what was going on. Still, incredibly cool.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- dilli 16y agois there anything wrong? I tried it with firefox, chrome, safari - i can move my pixel, but I always stay alone, seeing only a "wait" in the top right and no shape to create.
- frethaygil 16y agoI can't play this, I've tried both Chrome and Explorer, both come up with a blank grid and the word 'wait' in the top right.