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Show HN: Artificial Ivy in the Browser

da.nmcardle.com

96 points by dnmc 12 days ago · 18 comments · 1 min read

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This is just a goofy thing I cooked up over the weekend. It's kind of like a screensaver, but with more reading and sliders. (It's not terribly efficient, so expect phone batteries to take a hit!)

seszett 11 days ago

Very nice, I could suggest two more factors influencing growth that are important for plants: geotropism and phototropism.

Geotropism basically makes plants grow away from the source of gravity, and phototropism makes them grow towards light (and that is usually reversed for roots).

  • seszett 11 days ago

    To OP, I don't know why but you're apparently shadowbanned, and your comments appear "dead" even after vouching for them.

    Probably an automated heuristic, you might want to send an email to mods so they can reverse it.

  • dnmcOP 11 days ago

    Oh, those are great ideas. On that note, I was also considering simulating nutrients and rewarding the roots that find them.

bartvk 11 days ago

I appreciate that it's beautiful and awesome, but when the complete screen was filled, I wanted a flamethrower option.

  • dnmcOP 11 days ago

    Hah, believe me, the flamethrower feature is first in line for the v2 milestone!

    • bartvk 11 days ago

      I'd like it but don't listen to me and please just stay in love with programming because this is such an awesome little project.

    • saaaaaam 11 days ago

      It would also be really nice if you could snip bits, pruning what is growing - with cuts causing something different to happen...

  • ErroneousBosh 11 days ago

    Don't you know that you can just drive a Ford C700 refrigerated van through it instead of mucking around with messy dangerous flamethrowers?

spuz 11 days ago

This completely killed my OS and nearly took the PC with it. It started running ok but as it filled the screen, the FPS dropped and then my browser stopped responding, then the mouse started moving VERY slowly and then the screen went black and my Bluetooth got disconnected. At that point, even long-pressing the power off button did nothing and I had to switch off the PC at the wall...

I am going to put the blame on Firefox and Linux Mint but it's honestly impressive how a simple animated simulation can do this.

  • dnmcOP 11 days ago

    Oh no! I can run it on my phone, which is a few years old, so I figured it wouldn't lock anybody's computers up.

    It's pretty CPU-heavy because it's constantly creating and updating SVG elements. I may attempt to rewrite sometime with WebGL and shaders :)

  • butvacuum 11 days ago

    I have never seen a long press fail to cut power- assuming it works at all. I've never heard of it being tied to CPU state.

Nevermark 12 days ago

It's beautiful. Both the general texture created and the wave effects.

I would love to be able to control speed. I am curious what the waves would look like at very high speed.

As a wallpaper, a slow speed would be great.

Nice work.

namtr2810 11 days ago

That's awesome! could you add a functionality so that I could control the color of the lines?

totetsu 12 days ago

many years ago I used the safety filter data set from google quick-draw to do something similar with dick sketches.

  • serf 11 days ago

    I thought that moderation was done mostly manually?

    oh I think you mean the filter on the game portion?

mhuffman 12 days ago

This is very calming for some reason.

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