Google Maps Pacman | Hacker News Reader

Google Maps Pacman

google.com

237 pointsjbergknoff55 comments

That's cool, but I wish they had spent the time making Google Maps usable again.

this makes it usable again: https://maps.google.com/maps?dg=optperm&output=classic

until they kill it off entirely :\

there is no version of the GL-enabled maps that ever ran faster or better for me than the basic tiled original.

I can't stand how the whole UI jumps around, rearranges and resizes itself every time I try to do something. Seriously, buttons should stay put.

Agreed, and the search input stealing focus at page load when I'm trying to use the zoom shortcut keys always gets me. (So I see a lot of "===" or "---" in the text field and have to fight it by clicking on the map, usually twice as we face off in a tug-of-war.)

I see this kind of behavior every day in gmail and it drives me batty. I'll use the 'l' shortcut to bring up the label drawer, start typing the name of my label, and three to four characters later gmail is actually ready for me to start typing.

Then I'll backspace out and re-type what I already typed, and Gmail highlights and decides I must want the third entry in the list for some reason, and makes it highlighted. So I'm moving over to the arrow keys.

The same kind of behavior in the search input as you're describing, too. Sometimes I get auto-suggest appearing after only one keystroke, sometimes it takes two. There seems to be no rhyme or reason, other than after a while I can usually somehow predict when my query will begin to be understood by the suggestion engine.

The inconsistency is really jarring, but just below the threshold where I start looking for another service because of how much it annoys me. Sort of like when my external monitor is physically positioned on the left side of my desk, but every time I plug it into the laptop it gets the virtual location off the right side of my screen.

I have this with trying to go back to a previous search result on Google, very frustrating.

This is amazing! Thank you! I always get so frustrated when I go to use Google Maps ever since the UI update. The floating drop-down search box infuriates me to no end.

They actually pat themselves on the back over this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Hr...

I'm not sure the classic output mode fixes the problems. I still see some street names not showing up, and it still arbitrarily resizes my map and moves around when I do a search, which it never did in the really old versions.

OMG it's not just me? The lack of street names both on desktop and mobile is so frustrating.

Hahaha. I've been using the new GMaps for ages, and always thought it was fine. So I thought, I'll check out the old one and see how different it really is.

Holy crap it's fast. Wow. There's no loading or giant pixels, zooming is instant, scrolling around is instant. I can't get over how much faster this is. Woof.

Part of that might be that no one is using those servers anymore.

i can tell you, unambiguously, that it has always been this fast. those tilesets are almost certainly statically cached and served at lightning speed with practically 0 overhead from some regionally located cdn server.

server load would have a statistically imperceptible impact here; never seen a google product roll out with scale-related issues, especially one as mature as their gmaps architecture was at the time of the GL switch.

EDIT: the image-based maps is a great example of the "Choose Boring Technology" thread [1]. the benefits of the GL maps, IMO, do not justify the enormous speed sacrifice, at least to the end users. i'm sure google's ultimate plan was/is to merge google earth and "3d/vr/augment all the things!", but for basic maps it is just terrible. i'm really sad about the whole situation because they really have great looking, readable tilesets, much better than OSM (even if less complete). sadly, they never did get the pixel-density-appropriate versions made for mobile devices and all the features looked tiny when implemented using their js maps api :(

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9291215

Did Google render and cache all tiles on some interval? Otherwise, server load may affect speed if expired tiles are re-rendered.

I think one of the "benefits" of the new version of the maps is that they can more easily customize the output per user.

This means that they can show different businesses to you based on your searches, and possibly some day charge businesses to be "put on the map".

Sponsored listings and ads in map search are already a thing on mobile. If I search for certain common terms ("Smog Check", for example), some pinpoints are already highlighted differently because they correspond to ads in the search results list.

I wish they'd bring back the real estate search part of Maps. Anyone remember that short-lived project? It was awesome.

you mean the mobile app?

Maps was the one Google app I thought I'd miss when I switched to Blackberry.

And, it is. But Blackberry Maps is soo much nicer for the "just show me where I am on a map" use-case. Street names are shown, and displayed in large font, and the interaction is much faster than GM now. Google Maps has better data and more information like shops and transit... but the experience of using it is frustrating in comparison.

Was hoping to find some interesting links to levels:

I'll start https://www.google.com/maps/@42.6395308,-71.3158648,18z/data...

if you go to Mountain View...

Cool but I'm pretty sure someone needs to read up on the algorithms used by the ghosts...

http://gameinternals.com/post/2072558330/understanding-pac-m...

I was wondering whether they paid attention to that. There's definitely different behaviour depending on the ghosts (red always follows you)

Finally! Something good to come from the way this traffic circle was butchered!

https://www.google.com/maps/@39.4314342,-74.5802579,18z/data...

This is an awesome piece of work.

metagame: find the hardest/simplest level on earth :) (I got Manhattan vs Tokyo)

The one in Giza, Egypt is quite challenging.

Someone pointed out to me that the Arc de Triomphe is quite fun, with a big enough window size.

The Taj Mahal makes a near perfect Pacman grid: https://www.google.com/maps/@27.173227,78.0411062,18z/data=!...

It's not a great grid overall, but the zig-zag crookedness of Lombard Street is pretty fun to go through: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.8020373,-122.4196734,18z/dat...

Actually, in terms of snaking streets, while Snake Alley in Iowa is not as long, it makes for a much more playable grid: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.8118721,-91.1064303,18z/data...

pacman is a burner: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7870737,-119.2049763,18z/dat...

Not available from every country (at the time of writing this).

I feel so left out.

EDIT: I was wrong, just that it is not available in Safari. Works with Chrome.

Thanks, I figured it was a browser issue but I was wondering what I was supposed to be seeing. All I got was the regular maps page.

Finally tried in Chromium on Debian and wow, fun!

Works fine in Safari 7.1.3 for me.

Hmm, I'm using Safari, no problem here.

April Fools is the new Black Friday. It's creeping into the day before. Soon, all of March is going to be prank month.

I guess it's because in Australia it has been April 1st for 3 hours already.

Google Maps still has a lot of development work done in Australia. So it doesn't surprise me that the april fool launched 'early' in their timezone.

In this new global age, the International Date Line interferes somewhat with nailing down specific dates. In some parts of the world, it's already April 1.

This is the April Fools stuff I don't mind. Not a "prank" or fake story, just a cool thing you might not be able to justify at any other time.

A lot of the maps team is in Japan, so the maps April Fools stuff tends to launch at midnight GMT+9

No fair! The people in the midwest get an easy grid system!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Land_Survey_System

This reminds of the recent Pixels movie trailer- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAHprLW48no

This reminds me of when the google doodle was a mini-pacman game, neat it still works!

https://www.google.com/#q=pacman

They should implement one-way streets, where you have to obey the direction but ghosts don’t, to make Pacman even more interesting.

The nearly 45 degree orientation of streets in SF Soma sure do make it difficult to play.

Ingress is Pacmanified as well today--various icons are Pacmen or ghosts.

Photo evidence: http://i.imgur.com/7xzpTas.jpg

This is how DeepMind will train its pacman AI. Brilliant. :)

NOW WE KNOW how the self-driving cars work!

Good but not that useful..

Why not people who are downvoting me just provide uses of it?

Not all things created have to be useful. Some things can be fun. While we humans may not be the most efficient beings imaginable, we do excel in creativity ;)

i'm too old for this ... while it's amusing, i do not intend to plunge into the abyss of time lost to the exploration of things of small importance.

Then get off our lawn. :P

Well, I'm glad you at least had the time to write us all this little note informing us of how valuable your time is.

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