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Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?

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441–450 of 587 posts

Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?

#441
post #26

http://www.tropic.org.uk/~crispin/quantum/ Upside: it's got a quantum physics game engine, and can teach you quantum mechanics Downside: HN will continue to tear me apart for making them download a JAR file but you can grab the source and compile it yourself if you like

Looks cool. I'd love to be able to see more screenshots of the game - at the moment they're faded out and placed in the background, and when you click them you end up just downloading the game itself. I actually don't mind the JAR file thing ;) but I'm unlikely to download and try it without knowing a bit more about the game concept.

There are more screenshots here http://www.indiedb.com/games/quantum-marble-maze

Blog describing the physics here https://linkingideasblog.wordpress.com/2016/04/25/learning-q...

I'd hope the title explains the concept fairly concisely. It's a marble maze type game i.e. guide a marble towards a goal, stay out of traps. But the marble is quantum which means it looks more like a cloud and behaves nothing like a marble. This led to the levels looking less, well, maze-like than I'd hoped, but you've got to run with what you got, so I started bringing features into gameplay that wouldn't exist in a marble maze e.g. trying to fulfill multiple goals at once by getting orbits into a certain shape.

One thing you can say about my side projects is that they have been 100% out of touch with commercial reality (excepting a rock climbing website from the late 90s that made me a few k before I retired it)! I thought initially that some game studio might want to put money into developing Quantum Marble Maze beyond proof of concept into something more, but I guess either nobody has heard of it, because my promotion or delivery is somewhat lacking, or they're not that interested in something so experimental. Hell, even after open sourcing it I haven't had anybody contribute. According to the server logs only about 1000 people have even played QMM, and 10 people finished, which makes it considerably more niche than I had hoped for a project which tries to explain a truth "far more marvellous ... than any artists of the past imagined". Good thing I enjoyed the project for its own sake :)

Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?

#443
post #167

Hope I don't get flagged or anything. I am astounded by the generosity of the amazing people on this page and have been upvoting like a madman. I probably look like a bot at this point

Yes people here are just awesome. When i made this thread i never expected so many responses. It's a huge motivation for me to see how so many people are doing so many awesome things just for the joy of doing it.

Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?

#444

http://www.arabicreference.com I've always wanted a good Arabic root-based dictionary with vowelling, plurals, etc (basically Hans Wehr online). I also wanted the structured dataset for some linguistic "research". It was a fun project - I built out a web interface for reviewing and updating entries and put in a lot of hours of manual correction (just to get all the entries to validate - I still have a lot more correc…

hi, great project.

any idea if you plan to release the code or article of how you built the similar matching?

Thanks

Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?

#445

It doesn't have to be a full project, right? Do random drive-by PR-requests to open-source projects count? A few months ago I ended up scratching an optimisation itch for weeks, trying to figure out ways to make the lz-string[0][1] library faster and smaller. Near the end I went a bit nuts with trying out what works, methinks (nested trees built out of arrays and such), but I had a lot of fun. It's not even my librar…

Interesting. I need to do some deep diving on LZ myself, to build a highly-compressible custom file format. Would benchmarks from a really old laptop be useful for #98 ?

Probably, because it's trying to be backwards compatible.

LZ is really elegant once it clicks, and Pieroxy's approach of growing token size with alphabet is a very neat solution to the problem of the unicode alphabet being huge

Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?

#448
post #330
post #12

Oh man, that describes all of them. http://ipfessay.stavros.io/ - Publish uncensorable essays on IPFS https://www.eternum.io/ - Pin IPFS files with a nice interface https://www.pastery.net/ - The best pastebin https://spa.mnesty.com/ - Fuck with spammers https://www.timetaco.com/ - Easily make nice-looking countdowns And this is just the last two months or so? Also, lots of hardware stuff: https://www.stavros.io/proj…

Nice work! This thread is all over the place haha! Did they ever get to meet at the bridge??: https://spa.mnesty.com/conversations/amhhqthp/

Hahaha, those poor people! They meant a conference (ie phone) bridge, and no, the bot never went :P

Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?

#449
post #116

Yet another Game Boy Color emulator, written in Java: https://github.com/trekawek/coffee-gb It's quite compatible and brought me a lot of fun. Blog post describing it: http://blog.rekawek.eu/2017/02/09/coffee-gb/

Wow, that is really cool!

I did not have the idea of creating an emulator, but some time ago I got curious as to how games were made for the GBA, so to try that I made a small Pong game [0]. It's really fun to play with 'old' technology from our childhoods.

[0]: https://github.com/DylanMeeus/GBAPong

Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?

#450
post #12

Oh man, that describes all of them. http://ipfessay.stavros.io/ - Publish uncensorable essays on IPFS https://www.eternum.io/ - Pin IPFS files with a nice interface https://www.pastery.net/ - The best pastebin https://spa.mnesty.com/ - Fuck with spammers https://www.timetaco.com/ - Easily make nice-looking countdowns And this is just the last two months or so? Also, lots of hardware stuff: https://www.stavros.io/proj…

That's really prolific! How do you find the time to create so many projects?

Most of them are just weekend projects, and took two or three days to create. Then I spend the odd few hours here and there. I also go to bed very late, which gives me ample time to work on stuff during the time when everyone else is asleep.
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