Running Pong in 240 browser tabs

https://eieio.games/blog/running-pong-in-240-browser-tabs/

by pr337h4m • 1 year ago

350 31 1 year ago

The band "Ok Go" did a collaboration music video with google chrome once that had some really amazing synchronization of browser windows with dancers, and kaleidoscope like effects... This reminded me of that.

wedocharlie2• 1 year ago

Here's what it looked like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISL1GfXwr-o

Rendello• 1 year ago

I was introduced to Arcade Fire back in the day through a similar Chrome experiment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReIwYj7BACM

luma• 1 year ago

Delightfully absurd, A+ effort!

ge96• 1 year ago

really cool, I like how modifiable Chrome can be, looks like this one uses websockets but you can use an extension for tab communication too

remram• 1 year ago

Or just the web storage API

ashu1461• 1 year ago

and a listener on the storage change then ?

smithcoin• 1 year ago

Love anything made by Nolen. To me it seems like he’s hitting the sweet spot of developing single purpose apps/sites that give me nostalgia for what the internet used to be like.

qingcharles• 1 year ago

Obligatory:

https://imgur.com/a/FcYpGz1

LonelyWolfe• 1 year ago

I'm calling it - Doom is next.

rhgraysonii2• 1 year ago

I believe that Nolen has already done doom in iPhoto, if you are into that kind of thing.

eieio6• 1 year ago

Doom is kind of a pain because:

    * afaik I'm capped at 4 FPS (just how often you can update tabs)
    * more of the screen is likely to update on each frame, which requires way more "turning canvases into data urls to update favicons," which is expensive with my current implementation (although I wasn't aware of offscreencanvas, which might help here)

graypegg• 1 year ago

To be fair, doom is also a pain on a calculator[0]/pregnancy test[1]/milling machine[2]/touch bar[3]/PDF document[4]! I think that's part of the fun!

I absolutely love this stuff... I sort of think Doom at 4FPS is... juuuuust in the realm of playable if you've played it before haha

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2251463

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24396780

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Doom/comments/ezuw1f/doom_on_cnc_ma...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13008315

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42678754

rhgraysonii2• 1 year ago

I attended Nolen's recent talk at Recurse, and these absolutely mad but fundamentally funny and cool games as one-shots are so delightful.

It reminds me of the older internet, when people would make things just to be silly and have fun. I had some fun last night inspired by some of the stuff he has been posting making a very funny kind-of-quine that outputs its own source code of the page showing it, via BEAM decompilation and some other tricks. I wish I had the time to crank out things like this, and it makes me smile to know that there are people out there creating things in this manner that will just keep things interesting for all of us.

The piece that gets the sort-of quine is here, if anyone wants a laugh https://github.com/notactuallytreyanastasio/blog/blob/main/l...

eieio6• 1 year ago

ah hi! I made this! was wondering if this one would appeal to the HN crowd :)

Happy to answer any questions! And here are a couple of scattered thoughts:

    * I'm really interested in what this looks like if you use animations (firefox supports animated favicons) - I could, for example, anticipate future ball positions and create animated SVGs to get a much nicer framerate.
    * A friend pointed out offline that canvas rasterization (typically) is on the GPU, which is probably why my performance intuitions with my stuttering animation were so wrong
    * I am only moderately confident that chrome caps favicon updates to 4 a second; I know there are a lot of different ways to update favicons and I could have missed something here!

dataviz1000• 1 year ago

A friend pointed out offline that canvas rasterization (typically) is on the GPU, which is probably why my performance intuitions with my stuttering animation were so wrong

Did you solve it? A great resource is Jake Gordon's blog on simple JavaScript game design. He uses a double buffer front and back canvas game loop.

[0] https://jakesgordon.com/writing/javascript-pong/part1/

eieio6• 1 year ago

Sorry yeah I'm talking very specifically about the stuttering that I first saw when making a square move into the tab bar.

I was doing something inefficient (updating all my favicons many times a second), but I didn't really understand why that would cause stuttering in my foregrounded tab. My thought process was that the favicon stuff was happening in different tabs in different threads, and so it didn't make sense to me that the thread in charge of the foregrounded animation should suffer (unless my entire computer had slowed to a crawl and everything was getting slower - but it hadn't).

And my friend's point was just that i was probably GPU-bound and not CPU-bound (or at least I could be) and so I was not thinking about the original problem correctly.

uranium• 1 year ago

As one ridiculous-pong writer to another, I love your work. I really enjoy this kind of technical performance art, both to write and to view. It may also be part of why I juggle: "There must be a harder way to do this."

eieio6• 1 year ago

what’s your pong game? would love to see it

adamgordonbell• 1 year ago

Love it and man your output velocity is something else!

This, the global cap locks, the bad apple regex, the uuids, and more all since the 1 million checkboxes. I'm impressed with your hustle.

eieio6• 1 year ago

ah thanks adam! fun to see you here :)

OneLeggedCat• 1 year ago

Now I want to see Doom in browser tabs.

sho_hn• 1 year ago

Doom port in days.

aqueueaqueue• 1 year ago

Checkboxes now tabs. Always finding a novel place to get those coveted pixels

nektro• 1 year ago

now this is the kind of thing HN was made to showcase. excellent work friend ^.^

dejawu• 1 year ago

A similar exploration by Matthew Rayfield using the URL bar instead of tab favicons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7GtCLwTmV4

eieio6• 1 year ago

Matt's work is a huge inspiration for me!

I definitely had his URL stuff in mind when making this, but it'd been a while since I had actually read through his blog / watched his video. It was really fun to come back to it mid-project and remember that he went in the same "stack windows to get 2 dimensions" direction.

fitsumbelay• 1 year ago

impressive as always

kvemkon• 1 year ago

Reminds me of:

* "Show HN: I saw this mind-blowing experiment, so I made a simple version of it" (25.11.2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38413660

* "Synchronize a 3D scene across multiple windows using Three.js and localStorage" (27.11.2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38437773

capitainenemo• 1 year ago

WRT firefox and narrower tabs. You can still inspect the browser in firefox, and find the style rule for min tab width, then add it to userChrome.css

There's a few guides out there on this, and I'm sure someone has done one for tab width already.

Maybe that's cheating though. (there's also browser.tabs.tabMinWidth but I think it still forces a minimum unfortunately)

Running Pong in 240 browser tabs

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