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Show HN: Doodle with strangers 1 on 1 in real-time

paintacquaint.com

18 pointspaintAcquaint27 comments

Hey guys,

I'm re-releasing PaintAcquaint and I wanna know what you guys think about my site! I'll be doing a live-stream at 8 o'clock buuut here are the updates:

Updates from Beta:

-Cleaner UI w/ new icons courtesy of #tehkseven

-Updated Java Server

-Bitmapping so no more layering for each brush stroke for a drastically improved performance

-Full Screen Mode

-Hard Link for your saved photos

I just had a CRAZY session with some random dude. We wound up playing tic-tac-toe together, without saying a word.

edit*-> I guess I'm assuming it was a dude...

haha awww. That's awesome! I remember when I first showed the prototype to my classmates earlier this year they ended up killing an entire lecture just using it and the professor ended up yelling at them to stop. I really hope this time around it can catch some steam online.

Just did this a few moments ago. No dicks.

http://i.imgur.com/ZiZAc.png

Great idea. Unfortunately all of the people I was paired with wanted to draw pictures of penises, scribble over the whole thing, or leave after 15 seconds.

As soon as I saw this story I thought "DoodleRoulette!".

Had better luck this time:

http://www.paintacquaint.com/gallery.php?ID=231

Yeah.. I'm still trying to figure out how I should tackle the issue of just trollers. I was considering as soon as the current user wants to draw with a different person, they'll never get paired up with their previous partners for as long the session on the website lasts for. And it just keeps track of who they rejected.

Aww just had a good sesh where we drew (I think) a guy with a poster about looking both ways before crossing the road. Accidentally clicked leave.

This is fun, and I understand the idea of communicating through drawing... but I still find myself wanting to type at some point.

Maybe if you hang out for x seconds, you can text chat?

I was debating whether or not to add text chat, but I think the general consensus so far from people using it is they wanna talk. I'll definitely be adding it in the near future!

Also, completely separate thought, but I think the reddit crowd would love this if you could draw rage faces.

I like that you can't type

Hmm.. Maybe I'll have the text tucked by the side, and when its clicked or mouse over it'll appear? I'll play around with the design.

I was painting a guy then someone did a dog, then someone painted the sky, some trees, and someone was starting to do an elephant but i got disconnected, if you saved that image please share!

EDIT:

here's how it started

http://www.paintacquaint.com/g/221.jpg

I was looking for my drawing on his images folder when i got this (NSFW) http://www.paintacquaint.com/g/245.jpg

Not my drawing by far but hilarious!

http://www.paintacquaint.com/gallery.php?ID=235

This was a really fun thing and really creative picture imo!

Wow, some of the other links here are terrific. I'm amazed two random people have enough dedication to build such detailed stuff.

That was fun, I tried to paint a happy sky and a landscape, just like Bob Ross does on his shows. But I think I did it in the wrong order. Wonder if you could capture some of the pictures as they were being doodled and then show it as an animation, then let people vote on their favorites.

Well, the site's starting to bottom out. If anyone's still reading this, does anyone know what's a good way to pull in more traffic?

I've been kinda relying on reddit and deviantArt the past couple of days.

http://colorillo.com/ does the same thing, using HTML and JavaScript with no Flash, and it allows arbitrarily many participants at once.

Hey JoshTriplett,

Colorillo does a pretty good job at real-time drawing collaboration. There's a bunch of online-real time painting programs out there, like Flockdraw or scriblink. I purposely coded it to have the users pair-up to kind of emulate Omegle or Chatroulette.

The only reason why I didn't decide to make this application using HTML and JS is because I wanted to teach myself Flash + AS3. This was my only 2nd project in flash. I'm definitely planning on porting it to Mobile once I have free time.

I think I win:

http://www.paintacquaint.com/gallery.php?ID=224

I had a great time playing with this tonight, got into a virtual cartoon "fight" creating super-heroes and so on. Great app.

Thank you! All this positive feedback means a lot :D

http://www.paintacquaint.com/gallery.php?ID=233

Pretty neat, but needs a chat window or something. I just found myself painting messages ;)

Pretty cool. What's the technical stack behind it?

Oh! Glad finally someone asked. The front-end's using flash w/ as3. It was the 2nd project I made using flash, so it was really exciting when I was scrambling across the web for resources. The original front-end the client was actually layering each stroke on top of each other, so what ended up happening was the client would crash after 20ish minutes of moderate use. So I fixed that and ended up using bitmapping to handle the screen. I had a bunch of other features that I disabled for this release [opacity and the undo function] just because they were too buggy.

The server's running I believe CentOS 5.6? or .7? And it's written in Java. Anywho when there's incoming information it stores the coordinates that are being drawn into a buffer. If the buffer becomes full then it shoots it out those coordinates. There's also a 50ms cycle that checks the size of the buffer, so even if it's not full, it'll shoot out the points.

-edit-

I mean, for now the server architecture can handle light load but I definitely plan on implementing a more scalable solution if I get more traffic.

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