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Comment by delu | Hacker News Reader

Hi everyone, I made this! I already told my whole story in this article (if you'd rather watch a video essay about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CikpAHiPlmQ) so not much more to add other than I'm still (slowly) working on Line Rider! If you have any questions here I am

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Wow the poverty of my imagination 5 minutes ago. I read the start of your blog and I was like this sounds lame and geeky and I imagine some sort of I don't know like Bob sledding like 2D color game kind of weird thing and just sounded weird. And then I watched your video and I was like oh my God. It puts a smile on my face it's cool and thrilling and ASMR and something I'd never even heard about. thanks for helping provide this chance to open my mind to something new and really cool and thanks for like sharing your passion.

Hats off for this masterpiece, David — and my congratulations for not letting this dream escape but working your way through to see it bloom to fruitition.

I had immediate flashbacks to my old modder days for Jedi Knight and DN3D, I was reminded of the endless fun we had creating worlds out of the puzzle pieces we were handed on our underpowered machines.

Playing with GTA3 config settings, cheating physics engines in Stunts, watching the releases of the demoscene with awe. The time was magical and feels nostalgic in retrospect. I feel like pulling out one of my early works and doing the same.

Most impressive though I think is the development you did as an artist. Starting from the effect based presentation in your early works, it's wholesome to see you take all of the stuff you learned about physics engines, still top it off with more you've learned along the way — but then let it all take a backseat to telling a story instead. One of drama, hope, despair, struggle and eventually, "escape".

Thanks for making my day.

There's a drawer in my closet that's labeled "unfinished business".

I'm inspired to open it right now.

A fellow JK modder? Would you mind sharing what you made?

> cheating physics engines in Stunts

You mean this one?

http://www.ibiblio.org/GameBytes/issue20/misc/stunts.html

Oh, the hours I played creating the craziest tracks in the undocumented editor barely hidden away behind Shift+F1, reliably making the car hit the ground at a certain angle and speed, triggering a bug (probably an unchecked signed wraparound) that would make it accelerate infinitely into orbit.

Oh wow, Stunts! This game rocked. Best Loop de Loop physics ever!

Whoa. As someone who used to "play around" with Line Rider back in the day, I had no idea that was actually possible. That end sequence was amazing! The music score on the ascent was a perfect match. I felt like I was watching the final scene of a James Bond movie or something.

I was just about to ask you what the last item was in the track (that meme) but realized I didn't actually read your blog post and just watched the video. WHOA. Major, major props for such a great post to accompany the video with. I'm sharing this with everyone my age that knows what Line Rider is :)

Hi Conundrumer! I was part of the Line Rider community in the early days making manual tracks under the name Holcomb227. Your dedication is really impressive. It seemed like the community had many perfectionists and/or artists and I wonder what they're doing now.

Holcomb!!! It's great to meet you again! And yes the community still has perfectionists and artists!

Also do you have any of your old Line Rider videos or .sol saves (specifically "The Amazing Nose Manual", "Manuals", "Watch it Now")? If you do, it would be great to get them archived by Rabid Squirrel: https://www.dropbox.com/request/4tqU7np9RJrfu17LvBae

(LR Archive context: http://bevibeldesign.com/line-rider-archival-project)

If you want to get in contact, my Twitter is @d_e_lu and my Discord is conundrumer#1409

Unfortunately the computer I used to create most of my tracks and videos has had its hard drive wiped multiple times throughout the years. I did create a few tracks on my friend's laptop (now broken) so I'll check if that data can be recovered.

It's so cool to see these kinds of interactions happen. The size of the internet (and the world) is smaller than you might think! It puts a smile on my face :)

Alternatively: HN is a lot larger than you might think it is.

I just recovered the data from my friend's laptop. Unfortunately I couldn't find any .sol files for Line Rider. :(

It's always amazing to see what creative people can do with what is very likely a bug in the game engine. I suspect that the developpers of Line Rider didn't originally intend for people to be able to do the majority of the tricks on this track, but we could argue that it would be a lesser game if it didn't allow these techniques.

It reminds me of bunny hopping and similar "bugs" in old FPS engines that turned out so popular that they sometimes ended up being purposefully implemented in subsequent engines.

> It reminds me of bunny hopping and similar "bugs" in old FPS engines that turned out so popular that they sometimes ended up being purposefully implemented in subsequent engines.

Skiing in Starsiege: TRIBES immediately sprang to mind--and the wailing and gnashing of teeth that followed when they tried to reduce/limit it in Tribes 2 (only to add it back in with the "classic" mod).

Making the video, did you control the character directly or was it like a tool-assisted speedrun? And how much actually requires your own input, given how (iirc) there's some tracks that just run themselves?

(Not the author, but I've played Line Rider a lot a long time ago.) The character isn't directly controllable. They're affected by gravity, and collision with user-drawn lines. You can also draw "boost" lines that accelerate the character when touching, and "decoration" lines that don't interact with the character.

Omg that was absolutely nuts. I was relatively impressed all the way through and then the polygonal visuals flew by and that just blew me away.

Amazing amazing work!

> I was relatively impressed all the way through and then the polygonal visuals flew by and that just blew me away.

Indeed. The polygons were quite literally jaw dropping to me.

Is this track also available as a download somewhere to try it in linerider.com itself, rather than as a video?

Never heard of the game before, but now I want to try it with this track

Here it is: https://www.linerider.com/?layers&track=https://www.dropbox....

It's a big track so might take a while to load. The ending animation doesn't work properly at the moment

It loaded for me in under 5 seconds or something and runs great; impressive performance.

Edit: I'm new to linerider but is it super common to have the tracks set to music? Could be cool to have some basic ability to have a music track in app.

Thanks so much for that! The ending worked except for the credits

I’m curious how you were able to remake the game with the same physics. How was that process?

I started with loading the save files using an existing JS library. And then, with the help from past modders who decompiled the original Flash version, I was able to port the physics into JS. I had a lot of reference save files to verify if I did it properly.

That's incredible, especially given how finicky I imagine porting physics and math from ActionScript to JavaScript to be.

Hi. I too went to art school. And spent 10+ years working on a grand software art project.

I relate very deeply.

Well, what was it?

(Wall of text is fine if preferred; I relate too)

A kisrhombille-ish shape-grammar based l-systemly 2d geometry building system. For pretty pictures or whatever.

https://github.com/johnalexandergreene/Geom_Kisrhombille

https://github.com/johnalexandergreene/Forsythia/tree/master...

Oooh, a wall of pictures, even better!

In all seriousness, Wow, this is really cool. Reading through the readmes was admittedly less interesting :) than firing up the editor, getting confused for about 2 minutes, then going "oh" once I got the relationship between metagons and jigs, and that the kernel was basically a placement system based on a rule engine combined with a solver. Coool.

This is admittedly very over my head :) (I may or may not have tried deleting most of the metagons to see if I could start with with simpler layouts, but then I just got handed lots of single-metagon renders instead.)

This makes me think of a bunch of a different categories of Android apps:

- "paint by number" thingies that let you passively "color" pictures by matching up numbered colors with a pixellated numbered grid based on a supplied image

- pattern generators that let you create your own wallpapers, quite a few based on tesselated designs ("geometric pattern" and "tangram generator" are good keyphrases; "wallpaper pattern" also seems to weed out lock-screen pattern generators)

- active wallpapers that display graphical effects of different kinds

- "geometric drawing" apps that generally use some kind of rule system as the basis of control

There are likely other general categories I'm not thinking of.

This system doesn't directly fit exactly into any of the boxes defined above, but the apparent widespread popularity(?) for the above kinds of apps may suggest the existence of a target demographic that might like being available to play with this kind of thing on a phone or tablet. The only consideration is the learning curve.

I cannot deny that I'm describing several months/subprojects-worth of work to port the renderer to run within Android, replace the AWT/Swing UI with something that would be intuitive on touchscreens of various sizes, figure out what crowd(s) to make the app appeal to (eg, solely technical focus, or general passive/"arty" demographic)... but if you ever wanted to showcase the project further, given that the architecture is already written in Java, an Android port almost seems like a shoo-in answer. (I'd actually forgotten it was written in Java when I went "ooh, I want to play with this on my phone.")

Hmm; I made a wall of text to say "port this to Android". I'm more trying to say, "if you have the motivation, porting to Android may have positive results". :)

Thanks for sharing. It's very cool to see the results of sticking to/studying/exploring the depths of the implications of a specific rule system for as long as you have.

I'm glad you like it.

When the whole thing came together and was working I lost the fire for it. Really have no urge to work on it now. Believe me, I've tried too much. Cold wet ashes.

But it's been well smeared around the world and I'm pretty sure what I've found won't be lost. So that's good.

I'm on a totally different project now. Meditation basically.

So, greetings fellow artschool alumnus. What's your big computer project?

It's very interesting.

I can understand being done with something as complex to reason about yet fundamentally self-consistent (ie, lacking novel/unexpected details to discover). Heh, "cold wet ashes" is more interesting than "old chewing gum", I might borrow that :)

Perhaps someone could file "port to Android" on GitHub and tag it "good first issue for newcomers"... xD

At the end of the day, you stuck in there and finished it, and cold wet ashes are arguably better than fire drenched in burnout. (Ooh. That fell out nice. What's the meta equivalent of a rhyme?)

Meditation is interesting. I'm trying to figure out my brain as well. It's so weird; not only is every brain's user manual uniquely different, every single one is also written in a different long-lost language. And so the reverse-engineering process has to come up both with the content and the language. It's so annoying. :)

As for my "big computer project"... I somehow got the idea that "I shall solve the UI problem!" (......woops). Over the past few years this has slowly (and initially painfully) morphed and rounded out into a general interest in psychology, human focus, the understated/unintuitive amounts of friction produced by network effects, and how hard it truly is to solve for holistic, cohesive design that allows us to reason about complex ideas in ways that are intuitively instinctive.

The OCD about UI design started around 2003. I think I was 12, heh. It took from around 2006 to 2011 to go from "I shall make a new terminal!" to "eeh... the only winning move is not to play" when I kind of properly integrated the significance of obsession ("I must figure this out now") vs true interest ("I want to figure this out properly"). Developmental delay is fascinating. I guess my big project (if I could sign off anything at this point) was, uhh, growing up.

I still remain interested in the field of UX design, and continue to reduce ideas to their basic building blocks that I can objectively use for parts on a regular basis. So far I have a few fairly boring ideas that I might be able to commercialize at some point (into a field that already exists, but could do with better integration); if that fails, I'll just go back to the drawing board and start again. One of the more relevant things I've learned thus far is that trying really hard to make something work "because it has potential", without being able to reason through that "potential" end-to-end, is something to avoid like the plague.

(As for school, that didn't quite work out, mostly due to process failures surrounding institutional incompetence.)

Also. I just gotta tell you what a metagon is. Because it's cool and simple.

A metagon is the essence of a polygon. It's the definition of a polygon minus information pertaining to location, orientation, scale and chirality (handedness).

Huh. I may or may not be slightly more curious about geometry than I was before :)

Thanks. I think. (uhoh)

Please post again directly as Show HN. I would love to see more community response and add ons to your work, and find the next serendipitous connection.

hi conun long time listener first time caller here

question that I never got around to asking you when you were working on this: did the community meme about OII never being finished ever get to you? The line rider world is full of a lot of projects that never got completed (SamThePoor’s Cosmic Ultimatum, etc.). What kept you going on this, when so many other projects seemed to fizzle out, as the community kind of shrank and receded, before it really came back into the zeitgeist? I really respect the deliberation and thoroughness you take with each step when you start a project.

> did the community meme about OII never being finished ever get to you?

I've always found it really funny and played along with it!

> What kept you going on this

It was mostly my conviction about the creative potential of Line Rider but it helped a lot that the community remained alive and people understood the significance of this track

Chinese Democracy, Duke Nukem Forever... And now Omniverse II. I think as soon as Star Citizen is released, we can call this one a wrap and move on to the next universe.

Except Omniverse II isn’t a massive disappointment

Don't forget Half Life 3.

That is the craziest line rider track I have ever seen. Really good work, kudos!

Was not expecting my jaw to drop this morning. Well done man, well done.

Maybe the best art experience I've had this year; amazing!

Brilliant work! This game should be compulsory for all mechanical engineering students. It’s a good way to differentiate between function and ornamentation.

Incredible. I remember spending hours on line rider as a young'n. The ending sequence blew my mind.

Nice job.

I loved your RATIONALIZATION piece linked to in the article.

Is it finished?

Yes it's released: https://www.linerider.com/

I'm just working on maintenance and adding new features

Well done....

~slow clap~

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