Dynamic Pong Wars

(markodenic.tech)

34 points | by rendall 7 days ago

7 comments

  • pohl 11 hours ago
    Very cool. It eventually got stuck for me, too, towards the bottom. Stuck detection would be a next step.

    Then you could plot the change in score for the current war, and overlay other plots that different wars took.

  • urbanisierung 8 hours ago
    This is super cool! I saw the tweet last weekend and decided to (let) build it as well, but with more players: https://pong.u11g.com/
    • culi 8 hours ago
      add `filter: blur(20px)` on the canvas, slow the balls down and don't render them and you have a really nice lava-lamp-esque background effect
    • cyanydeez 6 hours ago
      try and see what happens when you base the speed and elasticity based on how many bricks owned.
  • bookofjoe 7 hours ago
  • kayo_20211030 8 hours ago
    A bit derivative, but mesmerizing. It's like watching a game of go being played by two demented players.
  • aktuel 8 hours ago
    It would be even better if the day/night counter would be visualized as a colored shifting slider.
  • RunSet 8 hours ago
  • mock-possum 11 hours ago
    Haha mine bounced around a bit until they managed to get stuck on eachother right in the middle

    It’d be fun to see a line graph mapping the change in score over time - I wonder what the wave function would simplify to? Would it be a sine wave? Or more of a saw, as one side snowballs ahead, then the other inevitably ramps up to recover?

    It’d also be cool to save the board state on each step, to find what the board looked like when each side was farthest ahead of the other, and when they were equal - and to play back the entire profession at super speed. Would it look like slime mold pulsing, expanding and contracting? Would there be swirls of white cutting into black and vice versa?

    • saghm 6 hours ago
      They got stuck for me as well. It reminds me a bit of the card game War, which has a similar zero-sum (and zero-choice) competition for a single resource that can take an extremely long time to complete, but without an equivalent for the mechanic for how to handle when the players play the same card. Maybe some sort of RNG is needed to break out of those stalemates, unless there's some sort of metaphorical lesson intended (like War Games, which despite the naming doesn't have much to do with the card game, but it does feature Tic Tac Toe prominently).