Hacker News Reader

Comment by v_b | Hacker News Reader

May I ask how old you are? Probably not from the Windows XP era, huh? We "old folks" know exactly what to do when it comes to defragging a drive.

Seriously though, thanks for the suggestion! I'll definitely add a small link with game rules to help everyone out.

View on HN

The idea behind defragmentation is to make the files themselves consecutive, which is not done in any way in this game, which makes it somehow confusing. The fact that DOS/Windows defrag also moves the used space to the beginning of the block device is mostly an implementation detail (and the experience with unix filesystems seems to indicate that it is actually better strategy to intentionally fragment the files by allocating the space almost randomly as long as the fragments are "large").

> We "old folks" know exactly what to do when it comes to defragging a drive.

Has nothing to do with age. Clearly the game has a host of limitations which has nothing to do with actual disk defragging. (Can only process the blocks one at a time in a specified but unknown to the user order. Blocks move one cell at a time and can't jump over other blocks.) And doesn't have others which are core to disk defragmentation. (Sectors, and files for example.)

As an old folk who watched a lot of DOS and win 3.1 defrag I could not figure out how to play. This game has many confusing differences from actual defragging: blocks can't seem to move over each other for example. And I think each block can move only once? It's a neat concept for a game but don't blame our confusion with the UX on lack of familiarity with the real defrag process.

I remember defragmentation from ca. Windows 95 times, and it was totally different from this game. None of the files shown here is actually fragmented, only the used space is, and for some reason you can't place a two-block file across a "line break".

edit: I realized that the "lines" might be meant to represent disk cylinders in the pre-LBA era, but even then, a line should "wrap around" to itself instead of the next line.

for the next level each file could have a different color. then multiple blocks of the same color would be one fragmented file. in easy mode the order of the blocks would not matter as long as all of one color follow each other, in hard mode the blocks would have to be in a specific order.

i would also allow blocks be moved freely with the goal to move as little data as possible.

Ok, but I had no idea I was already choosing a position to write the first file. I was pulling to refresh constantly on Firefox mobile until I finally figured it out. Which is a big difference to all the other moves - choosing a file to move first, before choosing a position to write it to.

Nifty game, but I almost gave up on it when I couldn't figure out what the hell I was supposed to do as the first move.

If I was you I wouldn't bother. The cool thing is not the game itself, it's the fact that we "old folks" just know what to do right away :) If you need to read instructions, probably you'll find the game dull anyway.

Exactly this was my intetion :)

Thank you

Counterpoint, I'd love to have this info. I grew up long enough ago to know (and do) disk defrags and the game is very similar to tetris in how it is fun and relatively easy. But iirc defrags made multiple passes, and it is not very clear whether the blocks in game correspond to pieces of the same file (where line 1 & 2 should be together) or of different files (where it does not matter). It's a nice game nonetheless!

@user_7832 Thank you so much for your feedback! I made this just for fun in my spare time, and feedback like yours is incredibly valuable and, more importantly, motivating.

It shows that there are people who take the time to provide thoughtful feedback in return for my invested time, which goes beyond simple comments like "this is stupid because I don't understand it."

Thank you!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com