Show HN: SineRider, a game inspired by my TI-86 | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: SineRider, a game inspired by my TI-86

sineridergame.com

On OSX/Chrome/rMBP, I couldn't edit the equations in the unity web player unless I was in full screen mode and then, when I entered full screen, exiting it caused my computer to enter a locked state which only a full reboot fixed.

Hmmm. I've heard a few people with this setup complain of this bug, but I have the same thing and I've never encountered it. It's almost certainly a bug with the Unity Web Player though, so unfortunately the best I can offer is that they will probably fix it, eventually...

Brilliant.

I always learnt more by doing. A few years ago I came across ARCalc[0] and playing with it really made me grok functions. Now SineRider gamifyies the exploration of functions. Neat!

[0] http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=30468

I'm not able to change the function on the second level. The input field is not responding.

Seems like a great concept!

What OS and browser are you on? Does this persist when you refresh?

OS X, Chrome 38. Now it works just fine. Didn't try refreshing the browser last time so don't know about that.

On [1] I'm not able to load anything. I just see the header text and an empty black square. Chrome 38.0.2125.111 (64-bit) on Fedora 20. [1]http://sineridergame.com/SineRider.html

That's because the game uses the Unity Web Player, which is not yet supported on Linux. Try using the downloadable version instead.

> which is not yet supported on Linux

And never will be. Luckily, Unity 5 will be able to deploy to HTML5.

Excellent. This is one of a very rare breed of games that attempts to encourage academic familiarity without ending up with extremely shallow mechanics that are more or less independent of the core topic.

My heuristic for evaluating a game for educational value is

"Is mastery of and success in the game directly proportional to understanding and comfort with the core academic proposition of the game."

This game scores brilliantly there. I hope educators learn to recognize the power of engagement in learning, and cultivate a sense of evaluating effective learning games.

I could not have given a better description of my central design principle for educational games. It's amazing how many people think that it's just a matter of wrapping some arbitrary incentive structure around a worksheet.

Maybe you should consider using an arbitrary-precision math library to calculate the graph and physics rather than relying on doubles.

The problem is actually that with my current parser (which is 3rd-party, and one of only a handful that works within my constraints) I can only sample the function about a hundred times per frame before I start to see serious drops in performance on many computers.

In the future I'd like to have a parser that's fast enough to sample at least every pixel, but until then it's going to be a little janky.

Thank you! Game of the Year!

I wish I had this in school. This might just spark a new interest in pure math for me.

...

I think I broke it: y = x^2 / ( 6000/t^(t*t) )

Small complaint: the number pad doesn't work for inputing numbers in Linux. Some other characters are inserted (e.g. 'ﾲ' for 2) which are invisible in the box but make the function invalid.

Thanks for the fun!

I've hit a bug on "Waves - Order Still Matters!" where the graph is affected by zoom and object positions. Sorry about the short report, but it's really hard to explain, it just happens.

What do you mean by bug? It's true that you can get slightly different simulations at different zoom levels due to the sampling optimizations needed to draw a new graph every frame, is this keeping you from completing the level?

The graph goes crazy. The sine is spiky, like there were too few samples or some kind of sampling aliasing. This happens in the web plugin and standalone Windows exe.

It's so hard to explain, but I loved the game so much I'll download a screen recording tool to show what's going on. Will edit as soon as I get the video captured.

EDIT: Downloaded the worst video capture tool but here it is:

- Default state, zooming in and out: http://i.imgur.com/N34bRcS.gif You can see spikyness and the graph changing with zoom.

- Default function, changing x's scale: http://i.imgur.com/LQ99RY7.gif This does not make sense at all.

- Sledding with x scaled to 7: http://i.imgur.com/9QukafO.gif The graph changes over time.

Ah, I see what you mean. The problem is indeed sampling. For performance reasons the graph only plots a point every 8 pixels each frame, so if you have drastic changes that happen below that interval you get weird rendering artifacts. Unfortunately this will inevitably be the case until I can get a parser that's fast enough to sample for every pixel.

Well, it kinda breaks the game, doesn't it?

Can you decouple rendering from simulation? I guess so, since it's easy to test whether a point lies below or above the curve. If at least what was simulated were reliable that level would be (somewhat) playable.

I would suggest having reliable visual sampling too (samples in absolute space, growing in number with zoom out), but I'm not aware of the actual performance implications.

I still think there's something else going on besides sampling error. Why is it (visually) working correctly for x*7 until I sled? Why does it change so dramatically over time?

This looks awesome! I remember playing line rider when I was in school!

I too remember the wasted hours... you still can too!

http://www.linerider1.net/

Hey, very cool. I'm working on a hobby project using Unity that also deals with rendering equations, and I'm curious, did you use LineRenderer to render the line?

A great concept, but the tutorial portion is just soooo long.

Maybe, but the same content takes weeks or months to cover in high school. Besides, you can skip to the next level or section when you feel like you get the idea; a feature which classrooms unfortunately lack.

It can be tough to strike a balance when post-docs and 7th graders are both in your target audience. I'm thinking of making two tutorials, one for people who have done this in school once before and one for people who haven't.

Did you try the non-tutorial puzzles?

Very cool, it really teaches the nuts and bolts of how functions map to graphs. Love it.

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There will be an Android version? It is so addictive :)

This is pretty cool, thanks for sharing!

LOL, this game should be given to everyone who complains about how complicated math is. Should cure them in minutes :)

Insanely fascinating

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