Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How We Built r/Place (2017)

redditinc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 107 posts

Re: How We Built r/Place (2017)

#61

Post by winrid »

When I broke my ankle I actually built a "live" version of r/Place for Android without ever hearing about r/Place. People just called it a "place clone" :p

It supports much larger images though!

You can find it on Android called "Pixmap".

How I built it:

Server: Client side websocket load balancing against NodeJS servers. Client connection location stored in DB. Separate service to route events between the client facing servers. Separate service which pulls change events from the DB and applies to images and also keeps track of the most popular areas of rooms, so the client can auto zoom you to those areas when you join.

Changing pixels involves two things. 1. Broadcasting the immediate event, and 2. Processing the image. When someone joins a room, they just fetch the image. The image processor is in Node too.

Client architecture: App is in pure Java. There are two rendering engines that we switch between based on zoom level. When you zoom out far, we mostly use the GPU, and individual pixel changes update a bitmap which is then pushed to the GPU. When you zoom in, it mostly uses the CPU and just a canvas as it feels more responsive this way. Also allows us to do things like add annotations to show who is drawing. Getting the transition seemless is tricky.

There's also a whole matchmaking system, which was a fun thing to build.

Anyway my ankle healed and I switched to other projects... :)

Re: How We Built r/Place (2017)

#62

Post by ASalazarMX »

treesknees wrote: post #16
unsupp0rted wrote: post #11

I don't like /r/place - I spend time in several regional subreddits, and they've transferred their nationalistic identity wars to Reddit. They're constantly fighting to build and rebuild their flags. Now those regional subs are littered with one post after another of "come on, we need your help to defend our flag" nonsense. It's all pointless and divisive.

It was divisive everywhere. I saw so many posts from folks arguing why X or Y shouldn't be on the board, or shouldn't use up so much space, or how flags were too boring. I stopped playing after the first day because of all the anger around it.

A good chunk of that anger was because of trolls. People extending someone else's flag over other's artwork, random streamers calling their followers for vandalism, and general griefing. Since regular users are limited to one pixel every five minutes, it can be exasperating to see their effort erased in a few seconds.

Re: How We Built r/Place (2017)

#63

Post by blamazon »

steelframe wrote: post #25

I wondered WTF was happening on my alma mater's subreddit when suddenly the whole front page became "we have to defend/win back our r/place space!!1!" I checked a few other college subreddits, and yup, this has become a spam scourge.

Oh no. Increased engagement in your online community for a whole 4 days. How did you survive? Please share tips and tricks.

Re: How We Built r/Place (2017)

#64

Post by wolpoli »

wingerlang wrote: post #54
theyeenzbeanz wrote: post #50

I participated and constantly had to fight against flags that keep severing and overriding our artwork and coordinators threatening to erase it entirely. We managed to make do, but the white only pixel at the end felt like a slap in the face after all the effort.

> but the white only pixel at the end felt like a slap in the face after all the effort. I'm not invested at all in Place, but to me it seems like the whole point of the event is that things are not permanent. The inevitable time-lapses is the ACTUAL artwork, not the final state of the canvas.

>I'm not invested at all in Place, but to me it seems like the whole point of the event is that things are not permanent.

That's probably the reason why they made it fade away back to white in the end. For many participants through, they were motivated to spend the entire weekend on this just to ensure that their creation ended up in the final snapshot and that would feel like a slap in the face.

Re: How We Built r/Place (2017)

#65

Post by blamazon »

wingerlang wrote: post #54
theyeenzbeanz wrote: post #50

I participated and constantly had to fight against flags that keep severing and overriding our artwork and coordinators threatening to erase it entirely. We managed to make do, but the white only pixel at the end felt like a slap in the face after all the effort.

> but the white only pixel at the end felt like a slap in the face after all the effort. I'm not invested at all in Place, but to me it seems like the whole point of the event is that things are not permanent. The inevitable time-lapses is the ACTUAL artwork, not the final state of the canvas.

Long ago I visited a Tibetan Buddhist temple in my town in the USA and they explained to me the significance of the Sand Mandala, [1] which is an intricate image drawn with colored sand on a square board by a group. There was one in progress and it was stunning to behold, clearly so many hours put into it.

Once the Sand Mandala is complete, it's ceremoniously swept into a bin and returned to nature. The idea, as I understand it, is to demonstrate how even actions that are impermanent have meaning, symbolic of our transitory lives on this planet. Or, stated another way, "maybe the real Mandala was the friends we made at the sand table."

Then I pointed at a Sand Mandala that was visibly hanging on the wall and asked what's that. They explained that that Mandala was present during a visitation by the Dalai Lama to their temple so they glued the sand in place and hung it up.

I was like, wait, doesn't that invalidate the premise of the Mandala? To which they just kind of shrugged and smirked and said "not really. That one is special, but it too will be destroyed someday."

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_mandala

Re: How We Built r/Place (2017)

#66

Post by mirceal »

sushid wrote: post #60
mirceal wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can’t get the required tps for this. observability would also be bad between blocks and you would also have states where you could end up with different pixels based on the block that won. so nope. wouldn’t work with blockchain

Are you talking about a specific blockchain or categorically condemning all L1s? Solana could definitely handle the level of tps for something like this. A cache could handle the observability issues and you can just keep the old pixel until the transaction goes through.

i was thinking bitcoin. really exciting if Solana could do it

Re: How We Built r/Place (2017)

#67

Post by Tijdreiziger »

cuteboy19 wrote: post #45
kps wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's all pointless and divisive. It's not pointless. Divisiveness drives engagement; engagement drives ad money.

I wonder if they count all the bots as active users

A theory that's been floating around is that they might intentionally not have implemented anti-bot measures, in order to pump up user numbers for their IPO.

Re: How We Built r/Place (2017)

#68

Post by hghmn »

matsemann wrote: post #7

Last time, wasn't there someone here saying it was easy to do and they could do it in a weekend, and then actually delivered? Can't find it, but perhaps someone here remember more about it?

The challenge: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14111143, and the follow-through: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14124934

Re: How We Built r/Place (2017)

#69

Post by istorical »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #62
treesknees wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was divisive everywhere. I saw so many posts from folks arguing why X or Y shouldn't be on the board, or shouldn't use up so much space, or how flags were too boring. I stopped playing after the first day because of all the anger around it.

A good chunk of that anger was because of trolls. People extending someone else's flag over other's artwork, random streamers calling their followers for vandalism, and general griefing. Since regular users are limited to one pixel every five minutes, it can be exasperating to see their effort erased in a few seconds.

You might be missing the point of those who disagree with your take, which is to call those who want to do different things on /r/Place than you 'trolls' or 'griefers' is itself just you projecting your own value judgment onto them, or acting as if you are the judge of what is right and wrong.

From the perspective of someone who likes /r/theblackvoid, the pixel artists coloring over the void are just trolls and griefers.

So the parent would refer to anyone 'complaining' about other users as unnecessarily angry. Whether it's a flag person mad that some other flag or art or void or whatever is drawing over their flag, or whether it's a void person mad at the flag person, or whether its a pixel artist mad at the flag person, it's all just people projecting their own preference as if its some moral imperative.

Who are you to say that streamers shouldn't use their followers to leave a mark? Or that chaos and randomly placing pixels isn't a valid goal? You may personally find it really stupid and annoying. I personally find baseball really stupid and annoying. But I wouldn't refer to people who enjoy baseball as trolls.

Dr. Seuss' butter battle is the perfect illustration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Butter_Battle_Book

Re: How We Built r/Place (2017)

#70

Post by david422 »

blamazon wrote: post #65
wingerlang wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but the white only pixel at the end felt like a slap in the face after all the effort. I'm not invested at all in Place, but to me it seems like the whole point of the event is that things are not permanent. The inevitable time-lapses is the ACTUAL artwork, not the final state of the canvas.

Long ago I visited a Tibetan Buddhist temple in my town in the USA and they explained to me the significance of the Sand Mandala, [1] which is an intricate image drawn with colored sand on a square board by a group. There was one in progress and it was stunning to behold, clearly so many hours put into it. Once the Sand Mandala is complete, it's ceremoniously swept into a bin and returned to nature. The idea, as I un…

Ha. Turns out we are all human after all.
Post reply on HN