Classic arcade game TRON on a cloth modelling grid | Hacker News Reader

Classic arcade game TRON on a cloth modelling grid

kreldjarn.github.io

284 pointskreldjarn88 comments

I didn't know quite what the headline meant - there was at least one TRON arcade game - as in, a coin-operated game - that had a totally different concept and which is now mostly deservedly forgotten:

http://www.mobygames.com/game/arcade/discs-of-tron

There was also a TRON arcade game that was a mismash of mini-games, one of which was the light-cycles:

http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=10204

I see from Google that indeed many, many people refer to this "use moving wall to make the other guy crash" style of game as "TRON" now, but TRON actually just put a brand name on a game genre that had been around:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_%28video_game%29

A home game circa 1977, years before TRON:

http://www.mobygames.com/game/atari-2600/surround

"Snake" to TRON could actually be one of the earliest, if not the earliest, example of a big-budget studio movie adapting a video game concept. Doing so surprisingly directly.

Now, of course, half the movies that come out of Hollywood seem to have action bits that are vaguely video-game inspired.

Thanks for the historical input!

I actually thought Snake and TRON were two distinct games with Snake being a 'player against environment'-game and TRON being 'player against an NPC'-game.

The TRON/Lightcycle genre is at its very best as a PvP(xN) game. Haven't logged in for years, but there used to be dozens of very active servers running Armagetron Advanced, and it looks like it's still going:

http://armagetronad.org/index.php

A very fun, fast paced, social, arcade-like gaming environment for someone not invested enough in gaming to delve into the likes of WoW or similar.

They had a tournament of this at PAX AUS this year. It's not dead.

> there was at least one TRON arcade game... that had a totally different concept and which is now mostly deservedly forgotten

I can barely express how amazing and influential Discs of Tron was to me as a kid. The concept, the animation, the black light... totally captured my imagination right when I was first learning BASIC on TRS-Model III and C64.

Discs of TRON was originally intended to be a fifth mode in the original Bally/Midway TRON, but was left out because of a couple of reasons. Some say there wasn't time to finish the mode, some thought the mode was fun enough to break out into it's own title.

And it does not deserve to be forgotten. Playing Discs of TRON in the "environmental" cabinet with stereo sound is a nice experience.

Anyway, here's some fun background on the TRON game, including some original design documents:

http://arcarc.xmission.com/Pictures/Tron%20Lost%20Documents/...

An arcade nearish to me had the environmental cabinet, complete with it's customer controller hardware.

This particular machine would give you small electric shocks from the controller which I thought was part of the game, but I now realize that was probably an electrical fault with that particular machine.

Why are you dissing Discs of Tron? In the environmental cabinet, it was one of my favorite games of all time. The locations that still have one running are cherished to me and the other fans.

I wish it supported arrow keys. WASD is really awkward on a Dvorak keyboard.

Ha! Sorry about that. I wanted to avoid hard-coding keycodes for the sake of legibility so I used 'W'.getCharcodeAt(0) — which unfortunately doesn't work for the arrow keys.

Why not just use constants?

On keyboards for other languages than english too.

Same problem on Colemak. (although less so thank Dvorak)

Or if you're right-handed.

What do you mean? WASD on a Dvorak keyboard is awkward no matter which hand you use.

The arrows are generally used with the left hand anyway since the right hand is on the mouse. There is

JKL

that is used the the left handed people I believe.

Don't left handed people usually keep the mouse on the left side of the keyboard? I've seen some people do that at least.

Some do, but not all. Most mouse ergonomics are made to be right handed, and since learning the mouse & keyboard is a new an alien concept for both left and right handed people, they can simply learn it with their dominant hand on the keyboard.

I wonder if that would make them better at micromanaging RTS games with keyboard shortcuts vs. shooting with the mouse in FPS.

"only on HN"

People with Dvorak keyboards aren't allowed to play this game.

Not true. If you want to challenge yourself you can play with increasingly obscure keyboard layouts. It's a feature!

Final boss: left ctrl, numpad 3, backslash, and ]. Better use your nose!

Dvorak users love a challenge; That's why they're Dvorak users.

PR'd https://github.com/kreldjarn/TRON/pull/13

EDIT: and pulled! Wow that was fast

Thanks for the PR!

What's the music in this? I see boats.m4a but it doesn't have any metadata.

I made it! I didn't figure anyone was going to take a look at it so I skimped on the metadata.

Oh, well damn. It's awesome! I would totally listen to this on a regular basis

Thanks! My band just released a new single: http://youtu.be/cDeRQ7rNP4Y (free download in description) — but that's quite a bit different from the music in the game.

I'm not going to lie, both the game music and the music in the youtube link are right up my alley. If you make an album of either, I'll buy them :)

Really good! I will definitely check out more Sykur stuff.

The music is great and fits perfectly. Really good job with the whole thing!

I perused the rest of your videos, and couldn't really get into them. But Strange Loop really hit a sweet spot for me. The lyrics and melodies are phenomenal.

I agree. The other stuff is a few years old, and I like to think the new single is more mature.

You're from THE Sykur? That's awesome, you're one of my favourite Icelandic hipster bands.

Awesome! Thanks for picking us from the plethora of Icelandic hipster bands!

I like this. Good stuff.

I have this on repeat to study to now. Love your song!

Yeah, definitely opened the game in a tab and just listened to the music. Great job!

Speaking of, you should consider adding a Opus or Vorbis for wider browser support.

Thanks for the heads up, I hadn't even thought that far ahead — the music was a bit of an afterthought.

I like it too, it reminds me of Mass Effect 2's music, galaxy map in particular (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1fJoBDP6Fo)

true! I tried to find that, thanks for the link.

Is the OPs music (i.e. the game music) up on Soundcloud or Youtube or may I take it from the sources like 'wget https://notendur.hi.is/~keh4/TRON/assets/boats.m4a'?

Sorry if the answer is obvious to someone more experienced, but what software/tools do you use?

This is Korg MS-10, Korg's Polysix softsynth and a few samples, all cooked together in Ableton Live and drowned in Waves plugins, mostly H-Delay and the SSL channel.

wow, your music's good man. keep it up!

It is really fascinating how much the music adds to the experience; it creates an instant atmosphere.

Honestly, the first thing I did after playing for a half a minute was downloading the track, and trying to find out who made it.

Hope there will be more tracks in this style (skyur wasn't really for me).

Ha, very slick - nice work!

The fabric makes timing a bit harder, but it's still a lot of fun.

Thanks!

Have you considered trying to make the fabric alter the gameplay (e.g. make things travel faster on warped fabric)?

Great work btw.

Thanks!

There's definitely room for experimentation! At some point I want to incorporate the cloth more in the actual gameplay itself, whether it's in this demo or something else.

It's a bit limited though, the forces exerted on the grid need to be within a relatively narrow range if the simulation is to obey the laws of sanity.

Pressing N for debug mode freezes the fabric. :)

var TOGGLE_CLEAR = 'C'.charCodeAt(0); var TOGGLE_BOX = 'B'.charCodeAt(0); var TOGGLE_UNDO_BOX = 'U'.charCodeAt(0); var TOGGLE_FLIPFLOP = 'F'.charCodeAt(0); var TOGGLE_RENDER = 'R'.charCodeAt(0); var TOGGLE_DEBUG = 'N'.charCodeAt(0);

Cool demo. Turns out it kind of ruins the game because it makes the task of timing turns so much harder, but there was no way of knowing that until you tried it :) Great experiment, though!

Shush, it's a gameplay feature! I agree it's not very fun to play — looks pretty though!

I actually really enjoyed the weird spin on gameplay and didn't have the timings issue you raised. However I did have problems forgetting which lightcycle I was after I died (that one lap around the board seemed to throw me every time!)

I do like this game a lot though - if just for the novelty factor

Too bad the keyboard layout diagram at the upper left doesn't do anything when clicked on. If clicking on the diagram keys had the same result as pressing the corresponding keyboard key, it could be playable on touch devices that lack keyboards ifyou added a way to start with a click.

That's a very good idea. I'll implement that once uni exams are over in a few days.

Wow that's really fun! Good work :)

Thanks!

Kills Firefox Developer Edition on MacBook Air. I still can see the demo, but the entire browser becomes unresponsive and the only option is to force-close it.

Uses all the CPU my single firefox thread can take, on both my home computer and work computer. I couldn't figure out what was wrong at first because it rendered beautifully and would respond enough to eventually start a(n unplayable) game after I mashed 'x' a bunch. It was only once I tried to close the tab that I realized it was being incredibly unresponsive.

To be fair, it's incredibly CPU-heavy. It uses an iterative approach to calculate the forces exerted on the grid, so for each frame it calculates the force exerted on each node a set number of times. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verlet_integration)

However, this shouldn't be so heavy that the Firefox JS engine struggles with it...

Yeah the weird thing is that aside from being unresponsive it seems to run fine. The lines move around and the fabric stretches and waves smoothly. That's on an older i3, and a newer 3.GHz i5. I bet it works properly in chrome. I like Firefox but I always seem to have performance issues with it.

This is some of the cleanest code I've ever seen. What ide/editor do you use and plugins etc?

Wow, thanks! I just used Sublime Text 2 (which I admittedly haven't bought so the prompt to buy it pops up every now and then when I save, gulp!). I have a ruler set at 80 chars and try not to surpass it.

Also, I have a JSHint plugin installed on Sublime which scans the document every time I save it and checks for missing semicolons, implicitly declared variables, etc.

Very neat! One minor nit - I didn't know which one of the line was me and died on my very first move...

Did the screen keep waving for anyone else after stopping the game? I'm feeling a bit woozy...

I felt a headache/migraine coming up within a minute and immediately closed it. I can't afford to play Hotline Miami for the screen shaking effect that adds, either.

I know one more guy who complained about Hotline Miami's screen shake: Totalbiscuit. Maybe I should try and link it to him on Twitter in hopes that he'll give me feedback.

Wow, I'm surprised how powerful that effect is. I only played for a couple minutes (very cool), and I think it's been about a minute of my vision waving.

I like the simple gameplay and music.sharing the highscore on twitter would be a fun feature.

Couldn't you just... make a post to twitter?

I know it's become popular to integrate that kind of thing into apps and sites, but personally I'd rather not have twitter (and FB) widgets that track all of my activity across sites.

Easy enough to copy the URL and make a twitter post.

Maybe you could include the rules? I can't seem to figure out what they are..

You play the white light-cycle.

i. Use WASD to steer — you can't turn on the spot.

ii. Don't hit anything.

iii. Try to make the other light-cycle hit something.

Nice work!

Hate to be a buzzkill, but you might consider renaming it before Disney C&Ds you.

The funny thing is, Disney probably would do that, despite it being almost criminally stupid. Given that they (supposedly anyway) intend to continue the Tron franchise with more movies, anything that helps create / sustain interest in Tron is a Good Thing for Disney. The smarter thing for them to do would be to contact the author of this, and say "Hey can we hire you?" or something of that nature, instead of sending threats.

I could see "We love it, but make sure to stick something on it saying its unofficial", just from a trademark dilution perspective.

but yeah a C&D/Github DMCA would be incredibly stupid.

Impressive! Is there some way I download/buy the music?

Looks cool but it froze my browser...

This was really fun! Good job!

Hold it! This is to fast.

an impressive technical achievement, and kudos for the music.

Fun game, and clean code.

Good job!

yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarg awesome!

good work! Cute game!

spectacular.

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