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

137 32 12 years ago

dang• 12 years ago

We added "Show HN" to the title because it looks like a perfect candidate for that. If you don't want it there please let us know.

kaoD4• 12 years ago

Brilliant.

I always learnt more by doing. A few years ago I came across ARCalc[0] and playing with it really made me grok functions. Now SineRider gamifyies the exploration of functions. Neat!

[0] http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=30468

TheSoftwareGuy• 12 years ago

A great concept, but the tutorial portion is just soooo long.

SigmaEpsilonChi8• 12 years ago

Maybe, but the same content takes weeks or months to cover in high school. Besides, you can skip to the next level or section when you feel like you get the idea; a feature which classrooms unfortunately lack.

It can be tough to strike a balance when post-docs and 7th graders are both in your target audience. I'm thinking of making two tutorials, one for people who have done this in school once before and one for people who haven't.

Did you try the non-tutorial puzzles?

julianz• 12 years ago

Very cool, it really teaches the nuts and bolts of how functions map to graphs. Love it.

tophattom2• 12 years ago

I'm not able to change the function on the second level. The input field is not responding.

Seems like a great concept!

SigmaEpsilonChi8• 12 years ago

What OS and browser are you on? Does this persist when you refresh?

tophattom2• 12 years ago

OS X, Chrome 38. Now it works just fine. Didn't try refreshing the browser last time so don't know about that.

_sigma• 12 years ago

On [1] I'm not able to load anything. I just see the header text and an empty black square. Chrome 38.0.2125.111 (64-bit) on Fedora 20. [1]http://sineridergame.com/SineRider.html

SigmaEpsilonChi8• 12 years ago

That's because the game uses the Unity Web Player, which is not yet supported on Linux. Try using the downloadable version instead.

vertex-four• 12 years ago

which is not yet supported on Linux

And never will be. Luckily, Unity 5 will be able to deploy to HTML5.

kaoD4• 12 years ago

I've hit a bug on "Waves - Order Still Matters!" where the graph is affected by zoom and object positions. Sorry about the short report, but it's really hard to explain, it just happens.

SigmaEpsilonChi8• 12 years ago

What do you mean by bug? It's true that you can get slightly different simulations at different zoom levels due to the sampling optimizations needed to draw a new graph every frame, is this keeping you from completing the level?

kaoD4• 12 years ago

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 and out: http://i.imgur.com/N34bRcS.gif You can see spikyness and the graph changing with zoom.

- Default function, changing x's scale: http://i.imgur.com/LQ99RY7.gif This does not make sense at all.

- Sledding with x scaled to 7: http://i.imgur.com/9QukafO.gif The graph changes over time.

LukeB_UK• 12 years ago

This looks awesome! I remember playing line rider when I was in school!

spacefight• 12 years ago

I too remember the wasted hours... you still can too!

http://www.linerider1.net/

shalmanese• 12 years ago

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.

SigmaEpsilonChi8• 12 years ago

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...

hughes• 12 years ago

Doesn't load! Uncaught Error: Bootstrap's JavaScript requires jQuery

mdturnerphys• 12 years ago

Small complaint: the number pad doesn't work for inputing numbers in Linux. Some other characters are inserted (e.g. 'ﾲ' for 2) which are invisible in the box but make the function invalid.

Thanks for the fun!

vxNsr• 12 years ago

This is pretty cool, thanks for sharing!

readerrrr• 12 years ago

Thank you! Game of the Year!

I wish I had this in school. This might just spark a new interest in pure math for me.

...

I think I broke it: y = x^2 / ( 6000/t^(t*t) )

hrc2• 12 years ago

Hey, very cool. I'm working on a hobby project using Unity that also deals with rendering equations, and I'm curious, did you use LineRenderer to render the line?

tempodox• 12 years ago

LOL, this game should be given to everyone who complains about how complicated math is. Should cure them in minutes :)

unnikked• 12 years ago

There will be an Android version? It is so addictive :)

keerthiko• 12 years ago

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 brilliantly there. I hope educators learn to recognize the power of engagement in learning, and cultivate a sense of evaluating effective learning games.

SigmaEpsilonChi8• 12 years ago

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.

anon4• 12 years ago

Maybe you should consider using an arbitrary-precision math library to calculate the graph and physics rather than relying on doubles.

SigmaEpsilonChi8• 12 years ago

The problem is actually that with my current parser (which is 3rd-party, and one of only a handful that works within my constraints) I can only sample the function about a hundred times per frame before I start to see serious drops in performance on many computers.

In the future I'd like to have a parser that's fast enough to sample at least every pixel, but until then it's going to be a little janky.

dailen• 12 years ago

Insanely fascinating

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

Related Stories