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CSS Minecraft

benjaminaster.com

91–100 of 154 posts

Re: CSS Minecraft

#91
post #85
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humorous postscript, btw: two months after Mojang forked my voxel engine, somebody left an anonymous "this is awful, you are a terrible programmer" comment on the engine repo. It's probably a total coincidence, but I like to imagine that the comment came from somebody at Mojang, and that my awful code is the reason why minecraft isn't a web app today :D

Is your repo still available?

Yup! Though I haven't touched it in several years:

https://github.com/fenomas/noa

Re: CSS Minecraft

#92
post #77

I wonder when AIs can write clever codes like this. Given a surprising constraint.

About a year ago I tried to make GPT give me a CAPTCHA using the same method and it failed (even after helping it quite a lot). I don't know how it would fare now. You can find a CAPTCHA like this in use for the Tor variant of Reddit (?).

Re: CSS Minecraft

#93
post #60

Recently I came across Quake implemented within a single WebGL shader ( https://www.shadertoy.com/view/lsKfWd ), but this is another level. HTML/CSS is a programming language now.

It’s extremely impressive, but it’s not “Quake”; it’s only the difficulty selection hallway from Quake. No enemies.

Re: CSS Minecraft

#94

Pug is an unsung hero in this demo. The template engine made it possible to brute force the UI with 4 levels of nested loop. Impressive!

Is pug doing something special here that another template engine, or just a custom script, could not do?

Concatenating strings is not that complicated.

Re: CSS Minecraft

#96
post #29

This is fiendishly clever, and really quite elegant. I made some of my own notes on how this works here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/26/css-minecraft/

[deleted]

Re: CSS Minecraft

#98
post #4

If anyone's wondering how it manages the state, a quick peek into the source code shows that it uses radiobuttons and the HTML contains all the blocks you could ever possibly place.

It's always radio buttons, every single time
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