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Comment by hnhnsomething12 | Hacker News Reader

There's already been MMO minesweeper games which are essentially infinite in all directions, similar to panning in Google maps.

IMO these solve the problem at the start of the game, because there's already an exposed edge you can work from. Someone, somewhere, had to make the first click; but from that point on every other player has a choice to avoid that experience.

Here's one such implementation: https://m3o.xyz/

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This is amazing. Too bad you seemingly can't zoom out to view the entire map all at once.

You can get something similar by clicking the location flag with the 8 alphanumeric coordinates in the upper right; that provides a full-screen maximally-zoomed-out map. I agree that it would be cool to be able to zoom out further than currently allowed to see more of the fractal map. The current zoomed-out view is something like Dynmap for Minecraft, I'd also be curious to see the equivalent of something more like Chunkbase that can show millions of cells at a time.

That said, I don't think the concept of "the entire map" makes sense. I expect it's functionally infinite, probably capable of scrolling to 2^32 or 2^64 cells, only allocating new regions in the database as people scroll there and start working. On that scale, you probably wouldn't see any activity at all.

According to the landing page "If every cell on the game field was as small as a speck of dust it would take 17 billion years at the speed of light to travel the width of the board." 17 billion light years is 1.608×10^26 metres, while the size of dust specks varies but is roughly around 10^-6 metres. That's a big field.

For a minesweeper MMO, you can try MineSweeper For Twitch [1]

The first Twitch Plays you can play with... your mouse!

We can go up to 10k cells max, but you can sweep mines with friends.

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[1] https://www.twitch.tv/bzh314

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