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Show HN: A game that tests how well you know your local area

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Re: Show HN: A game that tests how well you know your local area

#191

Post by dataflow »

adamlynch wrote: post #114
jedberg wrote: post #76

I did where I live now, and only got 100/500 (perfect score on the major road, no idea where the rest were). I did my childhood home and got 99/500. My suggestion would be to stick to majors and semi-majors (longer through streets). It would be more fun that way. Also there may be a bug, for the one road I got in the second try, I put the marker dead center of the entire road, but it said I was 4 meters off and gave…

Thanks for the feedback. I'll definitely fix the pin accuracy and I'm thinking about what to do around street length & difficulty

> I'm thinking about what to do around street length & difficulty

Here's one idea if it might help you get started (though you can polish it):

- Mark all "dead ends".

- Mark all private streets.

- Recursively (or perhaps I should say iteratively, depending on your POV) mark all roads as X that only lead to previously-marked roads.

- Non-recursively, unmark each marked road that is both adjacent to an unmarked road AND that satisfies some reasonable heuristic (such as "being within 2 intersections of the center of your circle").

- Also unmark all freeways/highways/expressways/other reasonably-major roads (although few if any of them should be marked at this point)

- Delete all marked roads from your list of candidates.

This should ensure that every candidate road actually has a non-negligible chance of being at least seen by random drivers, and not just by residents who are forced to drive on it on the way home.

You can obviously augment

Re: Show HN: A game that tests how well you know your local area

#192

Post by piceas »

lcuff wrote: post #165

Here is a different quiz about what you know about your local area. Pretty interesting. https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-big-here-quiz/

The geography student in me likes that the questions are bounded by your watershed.

As someone who grew up in a warm country I am also amused that the growing season is hinted as being bounded by the number of days from frost to frost.

Re: Show HN: A game that tests how well you know your local area

#194

Post by aasasd »

Very nice. I actually wanted to concoct something like this for Anki, with large streets of the city—since in this sprawl I sometimes only vaguely know what's on the other end of it. But didn't think that web maps could serve me for that.

Some minor nitpicks:

- If you could allow zooming in/out with double-tap-and-drag on phones, that would be cool. Specifically it would help with one-handed use.

- On a ‘square’, the road can go right around the pin, so the distance is measured inside this circle, and I get - Perhaps there's not much use in offering streets that only have like a hundred meters inside the radius—especially since the page doesn't allow scrolling outside the circle, to more comfortably tap the street and not aim at the small chunk of it.

- OTOH it would be better if I could scroll somewhat outside the circle, to have the streets in the middle of the screen where it's more convenient to look and tap.

As a side remark: using this in European-style compact cities, especially in ‘old towns’, can be quite a hardcore mode. In the 19th century, the region in the circle comprised the whole city and some outskirts, so now there are a lot of old streets in this area. And with my smaller native city (half a million people), the circle covers most of it.

Re: Show HN: A game that tests how well you know your local area

#197

Post by IIAOPSW »

microtherion wrote: post #179

Great game! The one "unfair" question I got was "Treppe Tiefgarage" which means "Stairs to the underground parking garage". Difficult to figure out how to filter these out in the general case.

I got "tunnel entrance street". There were two tunnels this might have referred to. I picked the one on the wrong side of town.

Re: Show HN: A game that tests how well you know your local area

#198

Post by cerivitos »

Love it! As many pointed out, playability is quite dependent on where you live. Perhaps you could also use landmarks rather than streets, but I'm guessing OpenStreetMap POI data is not as robust as Google Maps... And Google Maps Places API is expensive :)

Re: Show HN: A game that tests how well you know your local area

#199

Post by IIAOPSW »

rsstack wrote: post #18

I didn't realize it was just going to be street names, and picked my area in Manhattan. The streets and avenues are numbered :)

I did the same, but got tripped up by clicking on the East side of the Island when it asked for "W 14th Street".
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