Reading this write up is funny, because I had no idea this is what was happening. There didn't seem to be an explanation of what was going on. I didn't know it was a shared experience, just that various random things seemed to be chaotically happening. I completed a couple of tiles and I guess submitted them as I thought that was how you got to "the next level", but gave them really stupid names like "test 1b" - mostly this is because I assumed it was single player and only I'd be seeing the name!<p>I also got bored after creating a couple of tiles. I scrolled around and saw very complicated things, but didn't realise they were submissions, just starting points for solving the level...<p>I guess I was the April Fool!
I was adding a lot of "bonk" elements and I seem to have murdered rapier...<p><pre><code> Uncaught Error: recursive use of an object detected which would lead to unsafe aliasing in rust
at jt (rapier_wasm2d_bg.js:4836:11)
at 4ea5626ea4b1e4145572.module.wasm:0xf061c
at 4ea5626ea4b1e4145572.module.wasm:0xf0638
at 4ea5626ea4b1e4145572.module.wasm:0xb5e7b
at H.remove (rapier_wasm2d_bg.js:1051:14)
at l.remove (collider_set.js:87:18)
at y.removeCollider (world.js:343:28)
at PhysicsContext.tsx:258:15
</code></pre>
Also, this is super fun, and I'm sad I didn't learn about it when it was still live. It'd be really really cool if people could still permalink individual machines created. I know that might be an issue for storage. Maaaaaybe just base64 encode the JSON into a URL param??? Please?? I'd love to create weird maps and share them with people.
FWIW, HN's April 6th item on this, with 14 comments:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39953514">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39953514</a>
> There was no incentive to carefully consider where to place a sticker. Players didn’t have enough agency to advance the plot through their individual action. This limited creativity to simple patterns like tiling similar stickers or forming lines.<p>Ah, the game turned into a big corp job!
I tried participating when it came out. I think I spent an hour building something that was as reliable (in terms of getting the correct balls to the correct output) as I could. After I submitted it, I refreshed the page and found at that spot someone else's contraption (which was, admittedly, prettier, but not as reliable). Oh well; though, I wish that sort of thing was a bit more up front.<p>It also looks like I'm not the only one who hasn't figured out that the list of building blocks is scrollable!
Whoa, me and a friend had this same idea back in 2014 and implemented it for Ludum Dare. <a href="https://nickfa.ro/wiki/CoinSlot" rel="nofollow">https://nickfa.ro/wiki/CoinSlot</a><p>Cool to see a more refined and well-functioning version of the idea.
Reminds me of this from my young adult years, I wasted sooo much time on this very happily:<p><a href="https://www.myabandonware.com/game/the-incredible-machine-1mg/play-1mg" rel="nofollow">https://www.myabandonware.com/game/the-incredible-machine-1m...</a>
I feel like I'm missing something - why do certain elements seemingly only effect a specific color of ball in the machine? I assume it's to prevent the colors from getting totally jumbled up, but it doesn't seem like that's explained in this write up?
I wish they had a way of easily figuring out if any of the machines you built made it into the final version or not. Maybe for a future design it would be neat to store the titles of previous submissions in something like local storage and you could provide a notification.
The thing I'm most confused about is I thought xkcd was one guy named Randall's webcomic, but this post makes it sound like there are several people involved in creating the comics. Is that the case? Does Randall still draw them or is it like a company with a whole creative team now?
It is reminiscent of the very old DOS game "The Incredible Machine": you receive a certain number of various items (fans, conveyor belts, basket balls, tennis balls, cat, mouse (cat would follow mouse upon seeing it), mirror, candles, etc.) and with the items you had, you had to solve a problem like, say: <i>"To win the level, you must send 32 tennis balls above the wall"</i>.
> On April 5th, xkcd released Machine, our 15th annual April Fools project.<p>Wait, “our”? I thought XKCD was just Randal Munroe.<p>> Machine’s backend was written in Haskell by davean and Kevin<p>So at least two other people. Three when counting the author of the blog.<p>The Wikipedia page for XKCD doesn’t show these names. Is XKCD a multi-people effort now, or are these “friends of the comic” who work on interactive stuff?
I totally didn't realize it was collaborative. I thought I was only building rooms for myself lol.<p>Several years ago XKCD released a comic that was different depending the browser, operating system, ip, and referrer you use to view it.<p>I know people uncovered hundreds of versions of it but I never heard a detailed write up about how it worked or how many comics there were available.<p>Does anyone know if they ever figured it out?
Wow! What a work of art!<p>A few more links for the record (don't read too soon, possible spoilers):<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/xkcd/comments/1bxg43b/xkcd_2916_machine" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/xkcd/comments/1bxg43b/xkcd_2916_mac...</a><p><a href="https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2916:_Machine" rel="nofollow">https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2916:_Machine</a><p><a href="https://github.com/xkcd/incredible">https://github.com/xkcd/incredible</a>
Really cool, I really enjoy the "follow" feature. Unfortunately, the balls get stuck sometimes and I have to follow a different one. I guess a few bugs slipped through the mod queue.
The piece was well written and explained the functionality quite elegantly with enough technicality without overburdening the reader with technobabble.
Honestly every time I start to think I'm rather quite good at frontend development, someone posts something like this and makes me feel like an intern by comparison. To have built this in 3 weeks is Herculean to me. It probably would have taken me 3 weeks to figure out the physics context alone.
"Machine is rendered entirely using the DOM. During early dev I was leery I’d reaching the end of my rope perf-wise. I expected I’d eventually ditch DOM rendering for PixiJS or canvas when it got too slow. However, I wanted to see how far I could take it<p>...<p>I’ve heard comparisons drawn between modern browsers and game engines, with their tightly optimized GPU rendering and DOM / scene graph. The similarities have never felt more apt."<p>The DOM might have become faster, but using the GPU directly via Pixi is still a world above in terms of performance and using Pixi could have made everything more smooth. But dev time was limited .. and the result is still impressive.
I'm just the tiniest bit disappointed to have confirmation that mods probably didn't wait around for one of my zero-element machine submissions (I imagine I called it "patience is a virtue", given how long <i>I</i> had to sit around waiting to click submit on it) to eventually pay off :)
This is gold! Folks might be interested in my repo of all published machines:
<a href="https://github.com/scpso/incrediblexkcd">https://github.com/scpso/incrediblexkcd</a>
As a nerd, I hunger for consistency. This wasn't - it took snapshots and handwaved them together.<p>Can't help but feel it would have been a lot better with constrained physics and automated submissions.<p>The current version is probably more fun to be on "the inside" of, evaluating submissions and stitching them together, but at the expense of the finished product.
I love this XKCD.<p>I have a bookmark for it, and whenever I want to kick back a bit, perfect.<p>However, I've noticed that it has a tendency to go blank (i.e. fail and stop working) when multiple colour spectrum triangles are in play and in particular when they are on top of each other.<p>I'd really like to see some additional objects to place into the machine.<p>One other problem I have is that the "perma-link" button doesn't seem to do anything. When I come back to the URL, my machine isn't there.