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Show HN: SineRider, a game inspired by my TI-86

sineridergame.com

31–33 of 33 posts

Re: Show HN: SineRider, a game inspired by my TI-86

#31

Excellent. This is one of a very rare breed of games that attempts to encourage academic familiarity without ending up with extremely shallow mechanics that are more or less independent of the core topic. My heuristic for evaluating a game for educational value is "Is mastery of and success in the game directly proportional to understanding and comfort with the core academic proposition of the game." This game scores…

I could not have given a better description of my central design principle for educational games. It's amazing how many people think that it's just a matter of wrapping some arbitrary incentive structure around a worksheet.

Re: Show HN: SineRider, a game inspired by my TI-86

#32

On OSX/Chrome/rMBP, I couldn't edit the equations in the unity web player unless I was in full screen mode and then, when I entered full screen, exiting it caused my computer to enter a locked state which only a full reboot fixed.

Hmmm. I've heard a few people with this setup complain of this bug, but I have the same thing and I've never encountered it. It's almost certainly a bug with the Unity Web Player though, so unfortunately the best I can offer is that they will probably fix it, eventually...

Re: Show HN: SineRider, a game inspired by my TI-86

#33
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The graph goes crazy. The sine is spiky, like there were too few samples or some kind of sampling aliasing. This happens in the web plugin and standalone Windows exe. It's so hard to explain, but I loved the game so much I'll download a screen recording tool to show what's going on. Will edit as soon as I get the video captured. EDIT: Downloaded the worst video capture tool but here it is: - Default state, zooming in…

Ah, I see what you mean. The problem is indeed sampling. For performance reasons the graph only plots a point every 8 pixels each frame, so if you have drastic changes that happen below that interval you get weird rendering artifacts. Unfortunately this will inevitably be the case until I can get a parser that's fast enough to sample for every pixel.

Well, it kinda breaks the game, doesn't it?

Can you decouple rendering from simulation? I guess so, since it's easy to test whether a point lies below or above the curve. If at least what was simulated were reliable that level would be (somewhat) playable.

I would suggest having reliable visual sampling too (samples in absolute space, growing in number with zoom out), but I'm not aware of the actual performance implications.

I still think there's something else going on besides sampling error. Why is it (visually) working correctly for x*7 until I sled? Why does it change so dramatically over time?

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