Asteroids: By the Numbers (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Asteroids: By the Numbers (2019)

retrogamedeconstructionzone.com

40 pointsrbanffy10 comments

Everyone has done one of these, but I can't resist posting the asteroids clone I wrote to teach myself webgl:

http://jcupitt.github.io/argh-steroids-webgl

It works on phone (touch to fire, hold to accelerate), desktop and also on my smart TV (use left/right/up/OK on the remote)!

Source code in the obvious place. The particle effects run on the GPU, which is fun.

If anyone knows how to fix the audio on phones, I'm all ears :(

Nicely done! Every bit as playable as the original, though yours is actually a little less challenging because the ship is so small. I found it was harder to die (because I wanted to see what that looked like) than to stay alive.

[UPDATE]:

> Source code in the obvious place

For the benefit of other clueless people like me: https://github.com/jcupitt/argh-steroids-webgl

Hey, thanks! I think I liked the idea of being tiny in a huge void, so the ship is small and only accelerates very slowly.

It has a couple of fun secret keys:

- hold "P" for slo-mo (handy for debugging)

- hold "I" for a debug display of object counts

- hold "S" during game start to spawn extra asteroids in the level

- press "N" to make all asteroids explode once (handy if you are bored of shooting gravel)

Wonderful to read such an in-depth analysis of a true classic.

This part confused me:

Notice how the medium asteroid is twice the size of the small one, and the large is twice the size of the medium. If you think about it, this doesn't actually make much physical sense -- you can break a two-dimensional object into four pieces half its size, not two.

I'm looking at 2-dimensional objects on the table here, such as papers, and I just don't see how that is true. For instance split an A4 paper in half: you get two A5 papers, not four. By definition the size of an A5 is exactly half of an A4's size.

What am I missing?

I’m guessing this means half its size along one dimension - if I have a square of side length 2, I can break it into 4 unit squares (or 2 rectangles as you said).

I think it’s referring to the fact that the big asteroid could fit four medium asteroids in terms of area, while only two medium asteroids come out when it gets destroyed.

This is the same for medium to small asteroids.

In the comparison image from one large to four small asteroid you can see the reduction in total area of the asteroids.

He means the game is unrealistic, in the game you get 4 A5 asteroid pages from a 1 A4 page asteroid.

OTOH, I am not a small ship made of glowing lines either, so it's all fine.

All of the asteroids are self-similar and I’m using size to mean length here, though admittedly the term can be used to mean area sometimes.

When the author says "size" they mean "length", not "area". I too thought it was odd for an article about 2D shapes to use an ambiguous word like this.

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