Very cool. Occasional bug: I found myself 'winning' even when I was clearly not part of a pattern (sometimes even totally separated). Running Vista Chrome.
ya, this is one of the top bugs we want to fix. thanks
Swarmation: like musical chairs for pixels
31–40 of 77 posts
Re: Swarmation: like musical chairs for pixels
#32Thanks 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 updati…
Really 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://maprejuice.com/ http://demiox-boiko.no.de/ http://piston-hurricane.no.de/ http://nodelicious.no.de/ http://…
http://me-and-my-sherpa-from-mit.no.de/ also uses socket.io
Re: Swarmation: like musical chairs for pixels
#33Here'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
it might even be nice if the teams were forced to cooperate sometimes. if each team was a different color we could have color coded formations.
any more ideas?
Re: Swarmation: like musical chairs for pixels
#34Wow I can't believe how FUN this is. Edit: I just realized no one is commenting because everyone is still busy playing it.
It's really made me realize how irritated i can get by gray blocks moving out of formation.
have you managed to complete the lobster formation yet? i'm starting to think it might be impossible
Re: Swarmation: like musical chairs for pixels
#35Probably the first collaborative multiplayer game without any element of communication.
is 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
Re: Swarmation: like musical chairs for pixels
#36I love how I have no idea what is going on or what to do, yet it still keeps telling me I win.
Yeah 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.
Re: Swarmation: like musical chairs for pixels
#37For 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.
i 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.
Re: Swarmation: like musical chairs for pixels
#38This 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!
A good place to start is 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.
Re: Swarmation: like musical chairs for pixels
#39This 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.
Re: Swarmation: like musical chairs for pixels
#40You 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.