Running Pong in 240 browser tabs
34 comments
·February 20, 2025eieio
uranium
As one ridiculous-pong writer to another, I love your work. I really enjoy this kind of technical performance art, both to write and to view. It may also be part of why I juggle: "There must be a harder way to do this."
eieio
what’s your pong game? would love to see it
WastedCucumber
I was curious too, I guess it must be this one.
dataviz1000
> A friend pointed out offline that canvas rasterization (typically) is on the GPU, which is probably why my performance intuitions with my stuttering animation were so wrong
Did you solve it? A great resource is Jake Gordon's blog on simple JavaScript game design. He uses a double buffer front and back canvas game loop.
eieio
Sorry yeah I'm talking very specifically about the stuttering that I first saw when making a square move into the tab bar.
I was doing something inefficient (updating all my favicons many times a second), but I didn't really understand why that would cause stuttering in my foregrounded tab. My thought process was that the favicon stuff was happening in different tabs in different threads, and so it didn't make sense to me that the thread in charge of the foregrounded animation should suffer (unless my entire computer had slowed to a crawl and everything was getting slower - but it hadn't).
And my friend's point was just that i was probably GPU-bound and not CPU-bound (or at least I could be) and so I was not thinking about the original problem correctly.
adamgordonbell
Love it and man your output velocity is something else!
This, the global cap locks, the bad apple regex, the uuids, and more all since the 1 million checkboxes. I'm impressed with your hustle.
eieio
ah thanks adam! fun to see you here :)
null
OneLeggedCat
Now I want to see Doom in browser tabs.
Tr3nton
[dead]
rhgraysonii
I attended Nolen's recent talk at Recurse, and these absolutely mad but fundamentally funny and cool games as one-shots are so delightful.
It reminds me of the older internet, when people would make things just to be silly and have fun. I had some fun last night inspired by some of the stuff he has been posting making a very funny kind-of-quine that outputs its own source code of the page showing it, via BEAM decompilation and some other tricks. I wish I had the time to crank out things like this, and it makes me smile to know that there are people out there creating things in this manner that will just keep things interesting for all of us.
The piece that gets the sort-of quine is here, if anyone wants a laugh https://github.com/notactuallytreyanastasio/blog/blob/main/l...
smithcoin
Love anything made by Nolen. To me it seems like he’s hitting the sweet spot of developing single purpose apps/sites that give me nostalgia for what the internet used to be like.
dejawu
A similar exploration by Matthew Rayfield using the URL bar instead of tab favicons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7GtCLwTmV4
eieio
Matt's work is a huge inspiration for me!
I definitely had his URL stuff in mind when making this, but it'd been a while since I had actually read through his blog / watched his video. It was really fun to come back to it mid-project and remember that he went in the same "stack windows to get 2 dimensions" direction.
kvemkon
Reminds me of:
* "Show HN: I saw this mind-blowing experiment, so I made a simple version of it" (25.11.2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38413660
* "Synchronize a 3D scene across multiple windows using Three.js and localStorage" (27.11.2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38437773
LonelyWolfe
I'm calling it - Doom is next.
eieio
Doom is kind of a pain because:
* afaik I'm capped at 4 FPS (just how often you can update tabs)
* more of the screen is likely to update on each frame, which requires way more "turning canvases into data urls to update favicons," which is expensive with my current implementation (although I wasn't aware of offscreencanvas, which might help here)graypegg
To be fair, doom is also a pain on a calculator[0]/pregnancy test[1]/milling machine[2]/touch bar[3]/PDF document[4]! I think that's part of the fun!
I absolutely love this stuff... I sort of think Doom at 4FPS is... juuuuust in the realm of playable if you've played it before haha
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2251463
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24396780
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Doom/comments/ezuw1f/doom_on_cnc_ma...
rhgraysonii
I believe that Nolen has already done doom in iPhoto, if you are into that kind of thing.
luma
Delightfully absurd, A+ effort!
wedocharlie
The band "Ok Go" did a collaboration music video with google chrome once that had some really amazing synchronization of browser windows with dancers, and kaleidoscope like effects... This reminded me of that.
wedocharlie
Here's what it looked like:
Rendello
I was introduced to Arcade Fire back in the day through a similar Chrome experiment:
null
sho_hn
Doom port in days.
ge96
really cool, I like how modifiable Chrome can be, looks like this one uses websockets but you can use an extension for tab communication too
fitsumbelay
impressive as always
qingcharles
Obligatory:
ah hi! I made this! was wondering if this one would appeal to the HN crowd :)
Happy to answer any questions! And here are a couple of scattered thoughts: