10 ms·

A video game where you are an operating system

662 points by drfreckles 3y ago

Apocryphon 3y ago
This is pretty nerdy but c'mon, it's like Cookie Clicker or some other idle game when compared to Zachtronics titles.
- Scaevolus 3y ago
  TIS-100 is certainly far up there in "nerdiest game" rankings, and I must offer Bombe as well, the only game I know of that embeds Z3: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2262930/Bombe/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2262930/Bombe/
  - anta40 3y ago
    I think Core War (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War) is even nerdier, too bad there's no updated, polished implementation. P.S: I'm also a big fan of Zachtronics games: TIS-100, Shenzen I/O etc etc
- xeckr 3y ago
  Unlike cookie clicker, this game can actually teach you something.
  - Apocryphon 3y ago
    I’m not contesting that, just making an analogy to quibble against “the nerdiest game ever” claim. Like I appreciate its existence but just saying there are entire genres of this stuff.
  - cwillu 3y ago
    I learned a great deal about the dangers of grandmas from cookieclicker.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- TillE 3y ago
  It fits very comfortably into the category of "time management" game, which was a fairly popular casual genre 10-15 years ago. Cook Serve Delicious is probably the one notable example which is still going strong. Definitely distinct from idle games.
  - joveian 3y ago
    Wilmot's Warehouse is the one it most reminds me of (maybe the graphics), which is quite fun (except for the random crashing :( that seems to get worse after it starts happening). This one needs a lot of work, though. I did it wrong it seems looking at the other comments here but nothing about this one makes me want to try again. Wilmot's Warehouse has excellent pacing. The theme of this one could be made to work well but throwing everything at the player right away and see how long they can keep going is not my idea of fun. I'd suggest automation options combined with changing the use pattern of the system over time. Plus something to give the player more customization options so it isn't just "do this repetitive task as quickly as you can". Maybe a choice of cute loading icons that you can display in certain circumstances? Mini Metro is another well known game in the time management genera. I've seen some recent games with this design and played a demo of a not yet released game. It seems like a common small indie game genera since larger developers don't seem to touch it that I can think of (except possibly some mini games? I can't think of anything off hand but there must be some). I guess the larger developers go for RTS games instead. Possibly the OS theme could be turned into a kind of "bot combat" game (at least I think that would be the general genera I'm thinking of, but without direct combat in this case) if the internals are automated and then compared to the market as a whole, with established OSes that are fairly good at everything but not great at anything. These established OSes could then take various anti-competitive actions along the way that force you to get better at a different specialty than you previously targeted.
- nextaccountic 3y ago
  > Zachtronics Kinda sad that the dev quitted
Waterluvian 3y ago
I’m half a sentence into this website and I’m already completely on board. One of the best ways to grok a problem like this. “Hey now you’re the memory manager. Good luck.” I love this idea so much. I bet it could be dressed up in a cute way where it’s a take on the restaurant management sim. But the restaurant is a computer and your customers are the resources. Human Resource Machine was great this way. I remember at one point thinking, “wait, did I just make a linked list?”
- yung_steezy 3y ago
  Human Resource Machine is great! My wife ended up having a career change into coding after finishing it and the sequel
keyle 3y ago
Games like these have a strong future. Basically games that innovate beyond what a game engines like Unity or Unreal can offer are, by design, going in a direction that is more likely to succeed than anything we see come out these days... Making super nerdy games that are so far off the field the engines users can't touch you, puts you in a different league; even if your game looks like a dog's breakfast, as long as it's fun and usable. Indie games are dead, in the sense that they were indie games 5 years ago. This, is the new indie games now. GG. (ref: failed indie developer with 2+ commercial titles). It's a shame that Zachtronics stopped, they've always been ahead of the game.
- dangero 3y ago
  In what way does this game go beyond what Unity can offer?
- duxup 3y ago
  Maybe I'm missing something in your post but I find the same types of games have been popular for many decades now. I'm not sure those are any less likely to succeed, or that "You're the OS!" is more likely to succeed. And I'm pretty sure you can make this game in Unity...
  - pests 3y ago
    I'm guessing they are used to the default Unity 3D scene and player controller. Unity can create any type of game. In the end it's just helping you push vertices and shaders around. I do agree Unreal has it's roots more in 3D character shooters. A lot of assumptions built in but you can still work around them there too.
  - cornel_io 3y ago
    Not only could you make this in Unity, it'd probably be easier than in Pygame by a good margin. Game tech is basically universal for zero-graphics games like this, it's 100% "business logic". If you have to fight with the UI/display system for even a moment to make a game like this, then you're probably either using a library without enough features (which, ahem...Pygame, yeah...) or you just don't know the system well enough to be efficient.
shove 3y ago
Very cool. Reminds me of the game posted last week (defcon thing?) in which Tetris-block-like squares containing op codes fall and the user has to position Rube Goldberg sequences that shuffle the biggest possible number into the “score” memory register
- smokel 3y ago
  For those interested, that was OFRAK Tetris: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37083309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37083309
iraqmtpizza 3y ago
dwarf fortress rekt
markus_zhang 3y ago
And very soon you will provide a scripting language that allow the OS to automate things, right? Oh I see...
- iforgotpassword 3y ago
  Let's use a C interpreter so we can just copy Linux code over... Or the other way round.
smountjoy 3y ago
I like to imagine that, as in Ender's Game, the top-ranked player is unknowingly allocating memory for some critical infrastructure somewhere.
- shostack 3y ago
  Getting Severance vibes.
  - flopsamjetsam 3y ago
    Just started watching this, and I have no real idea what's going on :)
  - doctorwho42 3y ago
    Oh man,(spoilers) my pet theory is that the 'work' is actually them self-adjusting their implants. Remember they describe a number as a 'feeling' and some numbers 'feel' wrong. And we see behind the scenes that they are testing the main character with the psychiatrist/wife to see if it breaks the 'chips control/severance'. They are simply engineers perfecting the implants so that they operate better.
    - aspenmayer 3y ago
      I think that the numbers are in-house red team fuzzing attempts against the implant, with the goal being lower mean time between failures of the implant. It could also represent a debugger IDE, with the “spooky” numbers that we see jumping around onscreen on the workstation representing some kind of bad data that doesn’t pass tests that the normal numbers onscreen do pass. I’m reminded of the in house help desk tech support that someone calls for in the film Vanilla Sky, analogously.
- SilasX 3y ago
  “To compete your registration, tell us whether this image has a stop sign. And hurry it up, our self driving car needs this.” https://xkcd.com/1897/ https://xkcd.com/1897/
mlfreeman 3y ago
Somehow this needs to be linked to PsDoom (https://psdoom.sourceforge.net/ https://psdoom.sourceforge.net/), perhaps as "multiplayer" mode of some sort?
dextersgenius 3y ago
You know what would be cool? A defragmentation game. It's basically Tetris but in a circular layout, and you get more points the better optimized it is - with frequently used data blocks towards the outer tracks and old/archive file types towards the inner tracks. I always enjoyed watching graphical defragmenters do their magic back in the day and would unironically love to play a defragging game.
- reaperducer 3y ago
  Sort of the opposite of Breakout.
  - samplatt 3y ago
    Or the opposite of a particular type of block-tapping mobile game, like these on Android/iOS: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=clear.tap.geometrydash.puzzle.away.clash.block.games&hl=en_US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=clear.tap.geom... https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tap-away-3d/id1568058543 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tap-away-3d/id1568058543
- RheingoldRiver 3y ago
  it's not really related in concept, but I feel like playing various puzzles with pentominoes would feel a bit similar to this, as it's spatial reasoning puzzles. I adore pentominoes and spent a large portion of my childhood playing with them, recently rediscovered them as an adult.
  - joveian 3y ago
    For me it was Tangrams, which I've only seen one somewhat odd (in a "feels outsourced" kind of way) computer game (not that you can really improve on the physical version). I first thought you said pantomimes, which could also be interesting :).
    - RheingoldRiver 3y ago
      Definitely played with tangrams too, and funnily enough, I had a bunch of animal-shaped puzzles that I guess you could call pantomimes haha. If you enjoyed tangrams enough, I can't recommend enough picking up a set of pentominoes - definitely agree that a physical set is the right call. There's 12 total so you have 60 individual squares, (pentominoes are 5-square tiles), so popular figures are 6x10, 5x12 (a bit harder than 6x10), and 3x20 (very challenging). You can also get cubes and do 2x5x6 (really hard) or 3x4x5 (even harder). Recently though, I've been doing 8x8 - 4, which means picking 4 squares to remove from an 8x8 square and then filling in the rest (I have some wooden boards i picked up from an etsy seller but you can just as easily trace the outline on paper and color in the forbidden cells, which I've also done). Which has been delightful!
aviavinash 3y ago
Aren't we are the operating system and the main character in all the game?
MaxikCZ 3y ago
I selected easy and still got fed so many processes I cant possibly satisfy them all for more than a minute. What am I doing wrong?
- explaininjs 3y ago
  Remove any processes with an hourglass from the queue, and frequently click the I/O Events button to clear out the hourglasses.
  - MaxikCZ 3y ago
    I think I was already doing that, yet by the time 4 processes in processor turn green, 10 processes in queue turns red? Also even in the first 10 seconds I was already clicking like mad, wasnt really "easy" mode. Maybe one of my extensions designed to skip "wait 10 sec to skip this" is messing up the timings of the game?
    - explaininjs 3y ago
      Could be the extension. Though the logic seems to be all in wasm, not sure how the extension would modify it.
    - pcthrowaway 3y ago
      > Maybe one of my extensions designed to skip "wait 10 sec to skip this" is messing up the timings of the game? Might be related to time accounting differences between browsers also... are you using firefox?
      - MaxikCZ 3y ago
        Edge (sorry)
        explaininjs 3y ago
        Fine for me on edge. Maybe don't wait for processes to go totally green? If something is dark red/frozen it needs to be on the CPU immediately, regardless of what else is there.
CaesarA 3y ago
In idea, this reminds of the old game Core Wars and its special "Red Code" programming language.
bijoo 3y ago
uptime 0:07:44 - 259513
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bijoo 3y ago
My results: uptime: 7:44 score: 259513 mode: easy How did yours compare?
- zer8k 3y ago
  6:15 174612 on normal mode. Strangely fun.
fragmede 3y ago
FWIW, this was posted to HN on Sept 30th* and gained zero traction, with even the poster deleting their own comment. As I posted there, it's a really good concept. Add in levels (eg microcontroller in $interesting_product, is on a smartphone, load balancer or api box for a SaaS company), with the levels letting you introduce concepts one at a time, and then you've got yourself a college grade operating systems class. Throw in a bit of programming for automation and dig deep into OS cache algorithms (LRU baby!) and that's something I could have finished before I graduated high school. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36938032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36938032
thisOtterBeGood 3y ago
Found a small bug i think. If i assign a process to the cpu just when it dies (during the fly anmiation i guess) the game freezes (Cannot click any buttons anymore). https://i.imgur.com/4gbwwEZ.png https://i.imgur.com/4gbwwEZ.png
- drfreckles 3y ago
  Thanks for your report. It is fixed now! :)
samsquire 3y ago
I've been trying to imagine a game which is like a real time strategy game for programming You command coroutines, threads and processes across machines to do work for you, like units. You can collect data from database, transform it in a pipeline and give it back.
infogulch 3y ago
As the game gets harder with higher utilization you should be able to "buy" upgrades with tokens that you "earn" for hitting milestones or performance targets that automate small mundane tasks. Kinda like the universal paperclips game. Then you throw pathological workloads at the user that thwart the simple automations so you have to unstick it manually. So the user buys upgrades to slightly better automations, thwarted again by slightly more pathological workloads... Boom game progression loop.
- MagicMoonlight 3y ago
  Yeah I want to be able to buy a memory allocator. And maybe even the option to write one
rkagerer 3y ago
It needs ways to upgrade your computer to live longer.
itronitron 3y ago
Fun, I wonder if anyone has done a garbage collection game. I'm imagining an isometric view, like Zaxxon, where you drive a garbage truck around and collect dead references.
- PurpleRamen 3y ago
  Or maybe just fit it into Doom, equip a flamethrower, and burn the corpse of dead processes and their zombies. Not that we hadn't this already before in some way.
mamborambo 3y ago
In fact human living is basically a type of operating system, as we all juggle on a daily basis tasks, resources, input/output, storage, cache, and states. The concept of dashboard is an essential operating system tool, and on a human scale it is basically your bank, tasks, calendar and inboxes. Plenty of "self improvement" concepts then translate neatly into operating system best practices, such as using FIFO or LIFO to manage allocations, planning ahead to break deadlock situations, managing parallelism, and JIT garbage collection etc.
- isolli 3y ago
  It reminds me a bit of this book, which I recommend: Algorithms to live by. [0] https://algorithmstoliveby.com/ https://algorithmstoliveby.com/
- rolisz 3y ago
  And civilization is a distributed operating system! (I heard this from Joscha Bach)
- white_dragon88 3y ago
  What is the operating system analogy for whacking off? Clearing the cache?
  - sva_ 3y ago
    Luckily our computer hardware can Not self-repruduce yet.
    - codetrotter 3y ago
      But computer software can. Worms, viruses, etc Heck, even the operating system could reproduce in some sense. If the operating system on one machine is set up to regard itself as DHCP server, it would begin responding to DHCP requests in the local network. And in the DHCP response it can provide network boot instructions telling other computers to network boot a copy of the OS image of itself that it is serving. Any other computer that is configured to net boot could then boot the OS. Of course most computers are not set up to net boot out of the box. But on a network where they use net boot already you might be able to race their own DHCP server and get some of the clients to boot your OS image instead.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
spiritplumber 3y ago
Give it a Tron skin and I'll play it for a whole day <3
carreau 3y ago
Now, I want to write a program the play that game...
dxdm 3y ago
Awesome idea, but it's too hard for me. In normal mode, I'm already clicking like a maniac in the first 20 seconds of the game, and red processes accumulate, even though I'm cycling out the blocked ones. I had one process killed because no IO event ever came for it. Easy mode seems to be the same, or actually even harder. I don't even get to the point where memory becomes an issue, but at this pace I don't want to. Maybe I'm getting old, and I get that being an OS is stressful, but so is my job. I don't need another one! With more forgiving pacing that starts out easy and then increases to keeps just outside of my comfort zone, this could be a very fun game.
- aio2 3y ago
  That's what computers are for, doing the repetitive stuff without freaking out for you :)
  - cptnapalm 3y ago
    Maybe write a program that plays the game for you. It could be called You're the Operating System Operating System.
- bloggie 3y ago
  I had this same problem, where a process gets killed while waiting for an IO event that never came. All of the killed processes were killed in this state! Seems that there's no way to prevent this if it happens.
  - thatsnotmepls 3y ago
    You have to click on I/O at the top when it goes from (0) to (1).
    - bloggie 3y ago
      The thing is processes get killed before the IO event appears.
bratgpttamer 3y ago
TIL: Being a computer is hard and I don't ever want to be a computer.
- aio2 3y ago
  Well it's a good thing it's an autonomous job already replaced by computers.
benj111 3y ago
Coming soon, an OS where all components are gamified and done by humans.
sandworm101 3y ago
Total nostalgia for the days when an OS cared about the user. Moving memory pages around is all well and good, but a realworld OS has far more important functions than responding to the demands of the user. I suggest adding a dimension whereby the player must respond to the wishes of the OS creator/owner. Have the OS be asked to inject ads into content. The OS could slowly depreciate itself in order to upsell the user on the next version. The OS should detect un-friendly activity by the user and brick itself and/or report the user as a "pirate". Or the OS could be asked to respond to FBI/NSA requests to spy on the user.
pil0u 3y ago
Reminds me of this game where you are a paper clip factory: https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html
- mdaniel 3y ago
  recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36972227 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36972227 (not only discussed, but also plenty of "if you liked, you'll also enjoy" recommendations in there to further dissolve time into a blur)
xunil2ycom 3y ago
so much stress. It's too much like my dev machine.
Terr_ 3y ago
This seems related to a larger genre of "hectic customer service" games, often involving idiosyncratically demanding customers at a restaurant limited by time and resources. In fact, several of them have been rather explicit about the idea of humans subordinated into thankless jobs for machines, considering titles like "Sushi For Robots" or "Human Resource Machine".
Konohamaru 3y ago
Superlatively cool.
Jeff_Brown 3y ago
I love the idea. The interface is not friendly to people with bad eyesight, though. It would be better if you could tab to change what you were looking at and make those things bigger.

662 points by drfreckles 3y ago

Apocryphon 3y ago

This is pretty nerdy but c'mon, it's like Cookie Clicker or some other idle game when compared to Zachtronics titles.

Scaevolus 3y ago
TIS-100 is certainly far up there in "nerdiest game" rankings, and I must offer Bombe as well, the only game I know of that embeds Z3: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2262930/Bombe/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2262930/Bombe/
- anta40 3y ago
  I think Core War (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War) is even nerdier, too bad there's no updated, polished implementation. P.S: I'm also a big fan of Zachtronics games: TIS-100, Shenzen I/O etc etc
xeckr 3y ago
Unlike cookie clicker, this game can actually teach you something.
- Apocryphon 3y ago
  I’m not contesting that, just making an analogy to quibble against “the nerdiest game ever” claim. Like I appreciate its existence but just saying there are entire genres of this stuff.
- cwillu 3y ago
  I learned a great deal about the dangers of grandmas from cookieclicker.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
TillE 3y ago
It fits very comfortably into the category of "time management" game, which was a fairly popular casual genre 10-15 years ago. Cook Serve Delicious is probably the one notable example which is still going strong. Definitely distinct from idle games.
- joveian 3y ago
  Wilmot's Warehouse is the one it most reminds me of (maybe the graphics), which is quite fun (except for the random crashing :( that seems to get worse after it starts happening). This one needs a lot of work, though. I did it wrong it seems looking at the other comments here but nothing about this one makes me want to try again. Wilmot's Warehouse has excellent pacing. The theme of this one could be made to work well but throwing everything at the player right away and see how long they can keep going is not my idea of fun. I'd suggest automation options combined with changing the use pattern of the system over time. Plus something to give the player more customization options so it isn't just "do this repetitive task as quickly as you can". Maybe a choice of cute loading icons that you can display in certain circumstances? Mini Metro is another well known game in the time management genera. I've seen some recent games with this design and played a demo of a not yet released game. It seems like a common small indie game genera since larger developers don't seem to touch it that I can think of (except possibly some mini games? I can't think of anything off hand but there must be some). I guess the larger developers go for RTS games instead. Possibly the OS theme could be turned into a kind of "bot combat" game (at least I think that would be the general genera I'm thinking of, but without direct combat in this case) if the internals are automated and then compared to the market as a whole, with established OSes that are fairly good at everything but not great at anything. These established OSes could then take various anti-competitive actions along the way that force you to get better at a different specialty than you previously targeted.
nextaccountic 3y ago
> Zachtronics Kinda sad that the dev quitted

Waterluvian 3y ago

I’m half a sentence into this website and I’m already completely on board. One of the best ways to grok a problem like this. “Hey now you’re the memory manager. Good luck.” I love this idea so much. I bet it could be dressed up in a cute way where it’s a take on the restaurant management sim. But the restaurant is a computer and your customers are the resources. Human Resource Machine was great this way. I remember at one point thinking, “wait, did I just make a linked list?”

yung_steezy 3y ago
Human Resource Machine is great! My wife ended up having a career change into coding after finishing it and the sequel

keyle 3y ago

Games like these have a strong future. Basically games that innovate beyond what a game engines like Unity or Unreal can offer are, by design, going in a direction that is more likely to succeed than anything we see come out these days... Making super nerdy games that are so far off the field the engines users can't touch you, puts you in a different league; even if your game looks like a dog's breakfast, as long as it's fun and usable. Indie games are dead, in the sense that they were indie games 5 years ago. This, is the new indie games now. GG. (ref: failed indie developer with 2+ commercial titles). It's a shame that Zachtronics stopped, they've always been ahead of the game.

dangero 3y ago
In what way does this game go beyond what Unity can offer?
duxup 3y ago
Maybe I'm missing something in your post but I find the same types of games have been popular for many decades now. I'm not sure those are any less likely to succeed, or that "You're the OS!" is more likely to succeed. And I'm pretty sure you can make this game in Unity...
- pests 3y ago
  I'm guessing they are used to the default Unity 3D scene and player controller. Unity can create any type of game. In the end it's just helping you push vertices and shaders around. I do agree Unreal has it's roots more in 3D character shooters. A lot of assumptions built in but you can still work around them there too.
- cornel_io 3y ago
  Not only could you make this in Unity, it'd probably be easier than in Pygame by a good margin. Game tech is basically universal for zero-graphics games like this, it's 100% "business logic". If you have to fight with the UI/display system for even a moment to make a game like this, then you're probably either using a library without enough features (which, ahem...Pygame, yeah...) or you just don't know the system well enough to be efficient.

shove 3y ago

Very cool. Reminds me of the game posted last week (defcon thing?) in which Tetris-block-like squares containing op codes fall and the user has to position Rube Goldberg sequences that shuffle the biggest possible number into the “score” memory register

smokel 3y ago
For those interested, that was OFRAK Tetris: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37083309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37083309

iraqmtpizza 3y ago

dwarf fortress rekt

markus_zhang 3y ago

And very soon you will provide a scripting language that allow the OS to automate things, right? Oh I see...

iforgotpassword 3y ago
Let's use a C interpreter so we can just copy Linux code over... Or the other way round.

smountjoy 3y ago

I like to imagine that, as in Ender's Game, the top-ranked player is unknowingly allocating memory for some critical infrastructure somewhere.

shostack 3y ago
Getting Severance vibes.
- flopsamjetsam 3y ago
  Just started watching this, and I have no real idea what's going on :)
- doctorwho42 3y ago
  Oh man,(spoilers) my pet theory is that the 'work' is actually them self-adjusting their implants. Remember they describe a number as a 'feeling' and some numbers 'feel' wrong. And we see behind the scenes that they are testing the main character with the psychiatrist/wife to see if it breaks the 'chips control/severance'. They are simply engineers perfecting the implants so that they operate better.
  - aspenmayer 3y ago
    I think that the numbers are in-house red team fuzzing attempts against the implant, with the goal being lower mean time between failures of the implant. It could also represent a debugger IDE, with the “spooky” numbers that we see jumping around onscreen on the workstation representing some kind of bad data that doesn’t pass tests that the normal numbers onscreen do pass. I’m reminded of the in house help desk tech support that someone calls for in the film Vanilla Sky, analogously.
SilasX 3y ago
“To compete your registration, tell us whether this image has a stop sign. And hurry it up, our self driving car needs this.” https://xkcd.com/1897/ https://xkcd.com/1897/

mlfreeman 3y ago

Somehow this needs to be linked to PsDoom (https://psdoom.sourceforge.net/ https://psdoom.sourceforge.net/), perhaps as "multiplayer" mode of some sort?

dextersgenius 3y ago

You know what would be cool? A defragmentation game. It's basically Tetris but in a circular layout, and you get more points the better optimized it is - with frequently used data blocks towards the outer tracks and old/archive file types towards the inner tracks. I always enjoyed watching graphical defragmenters do their magic back in the day and would unironically love to play a defragging game.

reaperducer 3y ago
Sort of the opposite of Breakout.
- samplatt 3y ago
  Or the opposite of a particular type of block-tapping mobile game, like these on Android/iOS: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=clear.tap.geometrydash.puzzle.away.clash.block.games&hl=en_US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=clear.tap.geom... https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tap-away-3d/id1568058543 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tap-away-3d/id1568058543
RheingoldRiver 3y ago
it's not really related in concept, but I feel like playing various puzzles with pentominoes would feel a bit similar to this, as it's spatial reasoning puzzles. I adore pentominoes and spent a large portion of my childhood playing with them, recently rediscovered them as an adult.
- joveian 3y ago
  For me it was Tangrams, which I've only seen one somewhat odd (in a "feels outsourced" kind of way) computer game (not that you can really improve on the physical version). I first thought you said pantomimes, which could also be interesting :).
  - RheingoldRiver 3y ago
    Definitely played with tangrams too, and funnily enough, I had a bunch of animal-shaped puzzles that I guess you could call pantomimes haha. If you enjoyed tangrams enough, I can't recommend enough picking up a set of pentominoes - definitely agree that a physical set is the right call. There's 12 total so you have 60 individual squares, (pentominoes are 5-square tiles), so popular figures are 6x10, 5x12 (a bit harder than 6x10), and 3x20 (very challenging). You can also get cubes and do 2x5x6 (really hard) or 3x4x5 (even harder). Recently though, I've been doing 8x8 - 4, which means picking 4 squares to remove from an 8x8 square and then filling in the rest (I have some wooden boards i picked up from an etsy seller but you can just as easily trace the outline on paper and color in the forbidden cells, which I've also done). Which has been delightful!

aviavinash 3y ago

Aren't we are the operating system and the main character in all the game?

MaxikCZ 3y ago

I selected easy and still got fed so many processes I cant possibly satisfy them all for more than a minute. What am I doing wrong?

explaininjs 3y ago
Remove any processes with an hourglass from the queue, and frequently click the I/O Events button to clear out the hourglasses.
- MaxikCZ 3y ago
  I think I was already doing that, yet by the time 4 processes in processor turn green, 10 processes in queue turns red? Also even in the first 10 seconds I was already clicking like mad, wasnt really "easy" mode. Maybe one of my extensions designed to skip "wait 10 sec to skip this" is messing up the timings of the game?
  - explaininjs 3y ago
    Could be the extension. Though the logic seems to be all in wasm, not sure how the extension would modify it.
  - pcthrowaway 3y ago
    > Maybe one of my extensions designed to skip "wait 10 sec to skip this" is messing up the timings of the game? Might be related to time accounting differences between browsers also... are you using firefox?
    - MaxikCZ 3y ago
      Edge (sorry)
      - explaininjs 3y ago
        Fine for me on edge. Maybe don't wait for processes to go totally green? If something is dark red/frozen it needs to be on the CPU immediately, regardless of what else is there.

CaesarA 3y ago

In idea, this reminds of the old game Core Wars and its special "Red Code" programming language.

bijoo 3y ago

uptime 0:07:44 - 259513

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[deleted]

bijoo 3y ago

My results: uptime: 7:44 score: 259513 mode: easy How did yours compare?

zer8k 3y ago
6:15 174612 on normal mode. Strangely fun.

fragmede 3y ago

FWIW, this was posted to HN on Sept 30th* and gained zero traction, with even the poster deleting their own comment. As I posted there, it's a really good concept. Add in levels (eg microcontroller in $interesting_product, is on a smartphone, load balancer or api box for a SaaS company), with the levels letting you introduce concepts one at a time, and then you've got yourself a college grade operating systems class. Throw in a bit of programming for automation and dig deep into OS cache algorithms (LRU baby!) and that's something I could have finished before I graduated high school. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36938032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36938032

thisOtterBeGood 3y ago

Found a small bug i think. If i assign a process to the cpu just when it dies (during the fly anmiation i guess) the game freezes (Cannot click any buttons anymore). https://i.imgur.com/4gbwwEZ.png https://i.imgur.com/4gbwwEZ.png

drfreckles 3y ago
Thanks for your report. It is fixed now! :)

samsquire 3y ago

I've been trying to imagine a game which is like a real time strategy game for programming You command coroutines, threads and processes across machines to do work for you, like units. You can collect data from database, transform it in a pipeline and give it back.

infogulch 3y ago

As the game gets harder with higher utilization you should be able to "buy" upgrades with tokens that you "earn" for hitting milestones or performance targets that automate small mundane tasks. Kinda like the universal paperclips game. Then you throw pathological workloads at the user that thwart the simple automations so you have to unstick it manually. So the user buys upgrades to slightly better automations, thwarted again by slightly more pathological workloads... Boom game progression loop.

MagicMoonlight 3y ago
Yeah I want to be able to buy a memory allocator. And maybe even the option to write one

rkagerer 3y ago

It needs ways to upgrade your computer to live longer.

itronitron 3y ago

Fun, I wonder if anyone has done a garbage collection game. I'm imagining an isometric view, like Zaxxon, where you drive a garbage truck around and collect dead references.

PurpleRamen 3y ago
Or maybe just fit it into Doom, equip a flamethrower, and burn the corpse of dead processes and their zombies. Not that we hadn't this already before in some way.

mamborambo 3y ago

In fact human living is basically a type of operating system, as we all juggle on a daily basis tasks, resources, input/output, storage, cache, and states. The concept of dashboard is an essential operating system tool, and on a human scale it is basically your bank, tasks, calendar and inboxes. Plenty of "self improvement" concepts then translate neatly into operating system best practices, such as using FIFO or LIFO to manage allocations, planning ahead to break deadlock situations, managing parallelism, and JIT garbage collection etc.

isolli 3y ago
It reminds me a bit of this book, which I recommend: Algorithms to live by. [0] https://algorithmstoliveby.com/ https://algorithmstoliveby.com/
rolisz 3y ago
And civilization is a distributed operating system! (I heard this from Joscha Bach)
white_dragon88 3y ago
What is the operating system analogy for whacking off? Clearing the cache?
- sva_ 3y ago
  Luckily our computer hardware can Not self-repruduce yet.
  - codetrotter 3y ago
    But computer software can. Worms, viruses, etc Heck, even the operating system could reproduce in some sense. If the operating system on one machine is set up to regard itself as DHCP server, it would begin responding to DHCP requests in the local network. And in the DHCP response it can provide network boot instructions telling other computers to network boot a copy of the OS image of itself that it is serving. Any other computer that is configured to net boot could then boot the OS. Of course most computers are not set up to net boot out of the box. But on a network where they use net boot already you might be able to race their own DHCP server and get some of the clients to boot your OS image instead.

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spiritplumber 3y ago

Give it a Tron skin and I'll play it for a whole day <3

carreau 3y ago

Now, I want to write a program the play that game...

dxdm 3y ago

Awesome idea, but it's too hard for me. In normal mode, I'm already clicking like a maniac in the first 20 seconds of the game, and red processes accumulate, even though I'm cycling out the blocked ones. I had one process killed because no IO event ever came for it. Easy mode seems to be the same, or actually even harder. I don't even get to the point where memory becomes an issue, but at this pace I don't want to. Maybe I'm getting old, and I get that being an OS is stressful, but so is my job. I don't need another one! With more forgiving pacing that starts out easy and then increases to keeps just outside of my comfort zone, this could be a very fun game.

aio2 3y ago
That's what computers are for, doing the repetitive stuff without freaking out for you :)
- cptnapalm 3y ago
  Maybe write a program that plays the game for you. It could be called You're the Operating System Operating System.
bloggie 3y ago
I had this same problem, where a process gets killed while waiting for an IO event that never came. All of the killed processes were killed in this state! Seems that there's no way to prevent this if it happens.
- thatsnotmepls 3y ago
  You have to click on I/O at the top when it goes from (0) to (1).
  - bloggie 3y ago
    The thing is processes get killed before the IO event appears.

bratgpttamer 3y ago

TIL: Being a computer is hard and I don't ever want to be a computer.

aio2 3y ago
Well it's a good thing it's an autonomous job already replaced by computers.

benj111 3y ago

Coming soon, an OS where all components are gamified and done by humans.

sandworm101 3y ago

Total nostalgia for the days when an OS cared about the user. Moving memory pages around is all well and good, but a realworld OS has far more important functions than responding to the demands of the user. I suggest adding a dimension whereby the player must respond to the wishes of the OS creator/owner. Have the OS be asked to inject ads into content. The OS could slowly depreciate itself in order to upsell the user on the next version. The OS should detect un-friendly activity by the user and brick itself and/or report the user as a "pirate". Or the OS could be asked to respond to FBI/NSA requests to spy on the user.

pil0u 3y ago

Reminds me of this game where you are a paper clip factory: https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html

mdaniel 3y ago
recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36972227 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36972227 (not only discussed, but also plenty of "if you liked, you'll also enjoy" recommendations in there to further dissolve time into a blur)

xunil2ycom 3y ago

so much stress. It's too much like my dev machine.

Terr_ 3y ago

This seems related to a larger genre of "hectic customer service" games, often involving idiosyncratically demanding customers at a restaurant limited by time and resources. In fact, several of them have been rather explicit about the idea of humans subordinated into thankless jobs for machines, considering titles like "Sushi For Robots" or "Human Resource Machine".

Konohamaru 3y ago

Superlatively cool.

Jeff_Brown 3y ago

I love the idea. The interface is not friendly to people with bad eyesight, though. It would be better if you could tab to change what you were looking at and make those things bigger.