SigmaEpsilonChi

Looks to be calculating fine, but the limited sampling resolution we can achieve for the graph means that "high-resolution" functions like this will look… strange. Effectively what you are seeing is one-dimensional aliasing. Unfortunately we're stuck with it until we optimize well enough to achieve full per-pixel graph sampling. We have plans for this, but it's… complicated. It involves transpiling latex to GLSL, which I'm sure will be a super fun task for some motivated student and not at all a massive headache.

Sorry, didn't mean to disappoint :[

I'll tell you a secret though, there's a playable alpha at https://sinerider.hackclub.dev

sssshh don't tell anyone

This is very true! We try to lean hard into the unique strengths of browsers. We have a reasonably sophisticated custom engine managing all the game state stuff but the UI is basically just one HTML/CSS file. Implementing this fairly basic UI in Unity would be a headache, especially because of the nightmare that is mathematical function input. We just use Mathquill to solve that problem, the same library Desmos uses for their graphing stuff. Thank you open-source <3

Thanks! I don't know if it's unusually compact for web game dev, but I will take a victory lap on the vanilla JS "game engine" we built for this project. We get a lot of very Unity-like behavior in a much smaller package!

Built by my buddy Zane! Back in 2014 we were making these games simultaneously and trading notes!

It's not a Comic Sans derivative, it's Patrick Hand. Literally just some guy's handwriting. Hating on Comic Sans (and derivatives) in this age became a meme because people use these silly comic fonts for serious non-comic uses. But this game is literally rendered as a comic strip. What else are we gonna use?

We are in full compliance with http://comicsanscriminal.com/

Actually the visible sampling positions are a visual artifact independent of the physics, which samples the graph directly rather than using a polygon collision test. So neat tricks are very possible! The game should (should!) produce deterministic results independent of screen size or computer speed.

Very complex! I'm not exactly sure what the boundaries of pre-calc graphing are but I routinely see professional mathematicians and computer scientists stumped by the more advanced puzzles.

Good memory! Yes, there is a connection here. I originally built sinerider when I was just out of high school. My ambitions were much bigger than my skillset, so I never really finished it. I started working for Hack Club a few years ago, and this summer we decided to turn our students loose on an old half-baked alpha I had on the shelf. Honestly I thought they might just fix the bugs and touch up the sprites a bit, but they ended up doing a top-to-bottom renovation with all this crazy new original art and sound and shader effects. I honestly truthfully pinky-swear never ever thought it would look and sound and feel this good. Watching this happen has been one of the greatest joys of my life!

Compelling article. Definitely raises real problems deserving of scrutiny; technical, legal, and administrative. I was a little bothered that this is just a direct reprinting of a single (admittedly deep and well-rounded) anecdotal experience, with no input from subject matter experts or independent attempts to contact other tenants.

I sent the article to a friend who’s a hydrogeologist and environmental remediation consultant. Basically, the guy that cleanup companies send to assess these sites, take samples, and make remediation plans. His hot take:

“Based on the info in the article alone I’d be very surprised if soil or groundwater VOCs were getting into her unit in concentrations high enough to cause acute health effects. Sounds like there’s a vapor venting system installed which in my experience alleviates all indoor air concerns. It could be that it exhausts near her window or something and concentrates in her apartment, but that would be a design/architectural issue more than an environmental issue per se. My initial suspicion would be that she bought cheap furniture or there’s cheap carpets or something that are offgassing VOCs.”

A quick read from a single expert isn’t enough to draw conclusions, but I do wish the paper had bothered to seek that kind of input before publishing.

Whatever the cause of this person’s symptoms may be, inadequate environmental remediation is a very real problem that deserves our concern. I wish the comments in this thread focused more on that. Instead the primary debate is whether a single person with apparently serious symptoms but no expertise, resources, or authority made the right technical call after being ignored by the people with all the expertise, resources, and authority. IMO that is the real story here: a person bought (a) furnishing for (b) a condo on a plot of (c) remediated land, experienced a health crisis, and the relevant parties (that she’s paying rent and taxes to!) all seem to have ghosted her instead of investigating which of those 3 things was the problem. After an experience like that, how could you blame her for doing her best to collect evidence and draw her own conclusions?

Even if the cause she identified is wrong, it’s not imagined. This isn’t “cancer from cell towers” or “migraines from wind turbines”. You just won’t read an article from the victims of industrial pollution in Bayview/Hunter’s Point.

Hmmm. I've heard a few people with this setup complain of this bug, but I have the same thing and I've never encountered it. It's almost certainly a bug with the Unity Web Player though, so unfortunately the best I can offer is that they will probably fix it, eventually...

I could not have given a better description of my central design principle for educational games. It's amazing how many people think that it's just a matter of wrapping some arbitrary incentive structure around a worksheet.

The problem is actually that with my current parser (which is 3rd-party, and one of only a handful that works within my constraints) I can only sample the function about a hundred times per frame before I start to see serious drops in performance on many computers.

In the future I'd like to have a parser that's fast enough to sample at least every pixel, but until then it's going to be a little janky.

Ah, I see what you mean. The problem is indeed sampling. For performance reasons the graph only plots a point every 8 pixels each frame, so if you have drastic changes that happen below that interval you get weird rendering artifacts. Unfortunately this will inevitably be the case until I can get a parser that's fast enough to sample for every pixel.

What do you mean by bug? It's true that you can get slightly different simulations at different zoom levels due to the sampling optimizations needed to draw a new graph every frame, is this keeping you from completing the level?

Maybe, but the same content takes weeks or months to cover in high school. Besides, you can skip to the next level or section when you feel like you get the idea; a feature which classrooms unfortunately lack.

It can be tough to strike a balance when post-docs and 7th graders are both in your target audience. I'm thinking of making two tutorials, one for people who have done this in school once before and one for people who haven't.

Did you try the non-tutorial puzzles?

What OS and browser are you on? Does this persist when you refresh?

That's because the game uses the Unity Web Player, which is not yet supported on Linux. Try using the downloadable version instead.