7 ms·

Hi everyone, I made this! I already told my whole story in this article (if you'd rather watch a video essay about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CikpAHiPl

by delu 6y ago

Hi everyone, I made this! I already told my whole story in this article (if you'd rather watch a video essay about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CikpAHiPlmQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CikpAHiPlmQ) so not much more to add other than I'm still (slowly) working on Line Rider! If you have any questions here I am

otde 6y ago
hi conun long time listener first time caller here question that I never got around to asking you when you were working on this: did the community meme about OII never being finished ever get to you? The line rider world is full of a lot of projects that never got completed (SamThePoor’s Cosmic Ultimatum, etc.). What kept you going on this, when so many other projects seemed to fizzle out, as the community kind of shrank and receded, before it really came back into the zeitgeist? I really respect the deliberation and thoroughness you take with each step when you start a project.
- delu 6y ago
  > did the community meme about OII never being finished ever get to you? I've always found it really funny and played along with it! > What kept you going on this It was mostly my conviction about the creative potential of Line Rider but it helped a lot that the community remained alive and people understood the significance of this track
  - sdenton4 6y ago
    Chinese Democracy, Duke Nukem Forever... And now Omniverse II. I think as soon as Star Citizen is released, we can call this one a wrap and move on to the next universe.
    - tomcam 6y ago
      Except Omniverse II isn’t a massive disappointment
    - Shared404 6y ago
      Don't forget Half Life 3.
swayvil 6y ago
Hi. I too went to art school. And spent 10+ years working on a grand software art project. I relate very deeply.
- exikyut 6y ago
  Well, what was it? (Wall of text is fine if preferred; I relate too)
  - swayvil 6y ago
    A kisrhombille-ish shape-grammar based l-systemly 2d geometry building system. For pretty pictures or whatever. https://github.com/johnalexandergreene/Geom_Kisrhombille https://github.com/johnalexandergreene/Geom_Kisrhombille https://github.com/johnalexandergreene/Forsythia/tree/master/app/grammarEditor https://github.com/johnalexandergreene/Forsythia/tree/master...
    - exikyut 6y ago
      Oooh, a wall of pictures, even better! In all seriousness, Wow, this is really cool. Reading through the readmes was admittedly less interesting :) than firing up the editor, getting confused for about 2 minutes, then going "oh" once I got the relationship between metagons and jigs, and that the kernel was basically a placement system based on a rule engine combined with a solver. Coool. This is admittedly very over my head :) (I may or may not have tried deleting most of the metagons to see if I could start with with simpler layouts, but then I just got handed lots of single-metagon renders instead.) This makes me think of a bunch of a different categories of Android apps: - "paint by number" thingies that let you passively "color" pictures by matching up numbered colors with a pixellated numbered grid based on a supplied image - pattern generators that let you create your own wallpapers, quite a few based on tesselated designs ("geometric pattern" and "tangram generator" are good keyphrases; "wallpaper pattern" also seems to weed out lock-screen pattern generators) - active wallpapers that display graphical effects of different kinds - "geometric drawing" apps that generally use some kind of rule system as the basis of control There are likely other general categories I'm not thinking of. This system doesn't directly fit exactly into any of the boxes defined above, but the apparent widespread popularity(?) for the above kinds of apps may suggest the existence of a target demographic that might like being available to play with this kind of thing on a phone or tablet. The only consideration is the learning curve. I cannot deny that I'm describing several months/subprojects-worth of work to port the renderer to run within Android, replace the AWT/Swing UI with something that would be intuitive on touchscreens of various sizes, figure out what crowd(s) to make the app appeal to (eg, solely technical focus, or general passive/"arty" demographic)... but if you ever wanted to showcase the project further, given that the architecture is already written in Java, an Android port almost seems like a shoo-in answer. (I'd actually forgotten it was written in Java when I went "ooh, I want to play with this on my phone.") Hmm; I made a wall of text to say "port this to Android". I'm more trying to say, "if you have the motivation, porting to Android may have positive results". :) Thanks for sharing. It's very cool to see the results of sticking to/studying/exploring the depths of the implications of a specific rule system for as long as you have.
dylanz 6y ago
Whoa. As someone who used to "play around" with Line Rider back in the day, I had no idea that was actually possible. That end sequence was amazing! The music score on the ascent was a perfect match. I felt like I was watching the final scene of a James Bond movie or something. I was just about to ask you what the last item was in the track (that meme) but realized I didn't actually read your blog post and just watched the video. WHOA. Major, major props for such a great post to accompany the video with. I'm sharing this with everyone my age that knows what Line Rider is :)
qvq 6y ago
Hi Conundrumer! I was part of the Line Rider community in the early days making manual tracks under the name Holcomb227. Your dedication is really impressive. It seemed like the community had many perfectionists and/or artists and I wonder what they're doing now.
- delu 6y ago
  Holcomb!!! It's great to meet you again! And yes the community still has perfectionists and artists! Also do you have any of your old Line Rider videos or .sol saves (specifically "The Amazing Nose Manual", "Manuals", "Watch it Now")? If you do, it would be great to get them archived by Rabid Squirrel: https://www.dropbox.com/request/4tqU7np9RJrfu17LvBae https://www.dropbox.com/request/4tqU7np9RJrfu17LvBae (LR Archive context: http://bevibeldesign.com/line-rider-archival-project http://bevibeldesign.com/line-rider-archival-project) If you want to get in contact, my Twitter is @d_e_lu and my Discord is conundrumer#1409
  - qvq 6y ago
    Unfortunately the computer I used to create most of my tracks and videos has had its hard drive wiped multiple times throughout the years. I did create a few tracks on my friend's laptop (now broken) so I'll check if that data can be recovered.
    - freeqaz 6y ago
      It's so cool to see these kinds of interactions happen. The size of the internet (and the world) is smaller than you might think! It puts a smile on my face :)
      - jacquesm 6y ago
        Alternatively: HN is a lot larger than you might think it is.
  - qvq 6y ago
    I just recovered the data from my friend's laptop. Unfortunately I couldn't find any .sol files for Line Rider. :(
irjustin 6y ago
Omg that was absolutely nuts. I was relatively impressed all the way through and then the polygonal visuals flew by and that just blew me away. Amazing amazing work!
- Shared404 6y ago
  > I was relatively impressed all the way through and then the polygonal visuals flew by and that just blew me away. Indeed. The polygons were quite literally jaw dropping to me.
codetrotter 6y ago
That is the craziest line rider track I have ever seen. Really good work, kudos!
MivLives 6y ago
I loved your RATIONALIZATION piece linked to in the article.
6510 6y ago
Well done.... ~slow clap~
graderjs 6y ago
Wow the poverty of my imagination 5 minutes ago. I read the start of your blog and I was like this sounds lame and geeky and I imagine some sort of I don't know like Bob sledding like 2D color game kind of weird thing and just sounded weird. And then I watched your video and I was like oh my God. It puts a smile on my face it's cool and thrilling and ASMR and something I'd never even heard about. thanks for helping provide this chance to open my mind to something new and really cool and thanks for like sharing your passion.
endymi0n 6y ago
Hats off for this masterpiece, David — and my congratulations for not letting this dream escape but working your way through to see it bloom to fruitition. I had immediate flashbacks to my old modder days for Jedi Knight and DN3D, I was reminded of the endless fun we had creating worlds out of the puzzle pieces we were handed on our underpowered machines. Playing with GTA3 config settings, cheating physics engines in Stunts, watching the releases of the demoscene with awe. The time was magical and feels nostalgic in retrospect. I feel like pulling out one of my early works and doing the same. Most impressive though I think is the development you did as an artist. Starting from the effect based presentation in your early works, it's wholesome to see you take all of the stuff you learned about physics engines, still top it off with more you've learned along the way — but then let it all take a backseat to telling a story instead. One of drama, hope, despair, struggle and eventually, "escape". Thanks for making my day. There's a drawer in my closet that's labeled "unfinished business". I'm inspired to open it right now.
- Agentlien 6y ago
  A fellow JK modder? Would you mind sharing what you made?
- lloeki 6y ago
  > cheating physics engines in Stunts You mean this one? http://www.ibiblio.org/GameBytes/issue20/misc/stunts.html http://www.ibiblio.org/GameBytes/issue20/misc/stunts.html Oh, the hours I played creating the craziest tracks in the undocumented editor barely hidden away behind Shift+F1, reliably making the car hit the ground at a certain angle and speed, triggering a bug (probably an unchecked signed wraparound) that would make it accelerate infinitely into orbit.
  - egfx 6y ago
    Oh wow, Stunts! This game rocked. Best Loop de Loop physics ever!
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
Making the video, did you control the character directly or was it like a tool-assisted speedrun? And how much actually requires your own input, given how (iirc) there's some tracks that just run themselves?
- an_ko 6y ago
  (Not the author, but I've played Line Rider a lot a long time ago.) The character isn't directly controllable. They're affected by gravity, and collision with user-drawn lines. You can also draw "boost" lines that accelerate the character when touching, and "decoration" lines that don't interact with the character.
simias 6y ago
It's always amazing to see what creative people can do with what is very likely a bug in the game engine. I suspect that the developpers of Line Rider didn't originally intend for people to be able to do the majority of the tricks on this track, but we could argue that it would be a lesser game if it didn't allow these techniques. It reminds me of bunny hopping and similar "bugs" in old FPS engines that turned out so popular that they sometimes ended up being purposefully implemented in subsequent engines.
- Zancarius 6y ago
  > It reminds me of bunny hopping and similar "bugs" in old FPS engines that turned out so popular that they sometimes ended up being purposefully implemented in subsequent engines. Skiing in Starsiege: TRIBES immediately sprang to mind--and the wailing and gnashing of teeth that followed when they tried to reduce/limit it in Tribes 2 (only to add it back in with the "classic" mod).
Aardwolf 6y ago
Is this track also available as a download somewhere to try it in linerider.com itself, rather than as a video? Never heard of the game before, but now I want to try it with this track
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- delu 6y ago
  Here it is: https://www.linerider.com/?layers&track=https://www.dropbox.com/s/jiqmax5tq4z7edc/Omniverse%202.json https://www.linerider.com/?layers&track=https://www.dropbox.... It's a big track so might take a while to load. The ending animation doesn't work properly at the moment
  - Rapzid 6y ago
    It loaded for me in under 5 seconds or something and runs great; impressive performance. Edit: I'm new to linerider but is it super common to have the tracks set to music? Could be cool to have some basic ability to have a music track in app.
  - Aardwolf 6y ago
    Thanks so much for that! The ending worked except for the credits
Daub 6y ago
Brilliant work! This game should be compulsory for all mechanical engineering students. It’s a good way to differentiate between function and ornamentation.
cghendrix 6y ago
Was not expecting my jaw to drop this morning. Well done man, well done.
pradn 6y ago
I’m curious how you were able to remake the game with the same physics. How was that process?
- delu 6y ago
  I started with loading the save files using an existing JS library. And then, with the help from past modders who decompiled the original Flash version, I was able to port the physics into JS. I had a lot of reference save files to verify if I did it properly.
  - pradn 6y ago
    That's incredible, especially given how finicky I imagine porting physics and math from ActionScript to JavaScript to be.
xwdv 6y ago
Is it finished?
- delu 6y ago
  Yes it's released: https://www.linerider.com/ https://www.linerider.com/ I'm just working on maintenance and adding new features
Rapzid 6y ago
Maybe the best art experience I've had this year; amazing!
junon 6y ago
Incredible. I remember spending hours on line rider as a young'n. The ending sequence blew my mind. Nice job.

by delu 6y ago

otde 6y ago

hi conun long time listener first time caller here question that I never got around to asking you when you were working on this: did the community meme about OII never being finished ever get to you? The line rider world is full of a lot of projects that never got completed (SamThePoor’s Cosmic Ultimatum, etc.). What kept you going on this, when so many other projects seemed to fizzle out, as the community kind of shrank and receded, before it really came back into the zeitgeist? I really respect the deliberation and thoroughness you take with each step when you start a project.

delu 6y ago
> did the community meme about OII never being finished ever get to you? I've always found it really funny and played along with it! > What kept you going on this It was mostly my conviction about the creative potential of Line Rider but it helped a lot that the community remained alive and people understood the significance of this track
- sdenton4 6y ago
  Chinese Democracy, Duke Nukem Forever... And now Omniverse II. I think as soon as Star Citizen is released, we can call this one a wrap and move on to the next universe.
  - tomcam 6y ago
    Except Omniverse II isn’t a massive disappointment
  - Shared404 6y ago
    Don't forget Half Life 3.

swayvil 6y ago

Hi. I too went to art school. And spent 10+ years working on a grand software art project. I relate very deeply.

exikyut 6y ago
Well, what was it? (Wall of text is fine if preferred; I relate too)
- swayvil 6y ago
  A kisrhombille-ish shape-grammar based l-systemly 2d geometry building system. For pretty pictures or whatever. https://github.com/johnalexandergreene/Geom_Kisrhombille https://github.com/johnalexandergreene/Geom_Kisrhombille https://github.com/johnalexandergreene/Forsythia/tree/master/app/grammarEditor https://github.com/johnalexandergreene/Forsythia/tree/master...
  - exikyut 6y ago
    Oooh, a wall of pictures, even better! In all seriousness, Wow, this is really cool. Reading through the readmes was admittedly less interesting :) than firing up the editor, getting confused for about 2 minutes, then going "oh" once I got the relationship between metagons and jigs, and that the kernel was basically a placement system based on a rule engine combined with a solver. Coool. This is admittedly very over my head :) (I may or may not have tried deleting most of the metagons to see if I could start with with simpler layouts, but then I just got handed lots of single-metagon renders instead.) This makes me think of a bunch of a different categories of Android apps: - "paint by number" thingies that let you passively "color" pictures by matching up numbered colors with a pixellated numbered grid based on a supplied image - pattern generators that let you create your own wallpapers, quite a few based on tesselated designs ("geometric pattern" and "tangram generator" are good keyphrases; "wallpaper pattern" also seems to weed out lock-screen pattern generators) - active wallpapers that display graphical effects of different kinds - "geometric drawing" apps that generally use some kind of rule system as the basis of control There are likely other general categories I'm not thinking of. This system doesn't directly fit exactly into any of the boxes defined above, but the apparent widespread popularity(?) for the above kinds of apps may suggest the existence of a target demographic that might like being available to play with this kind of thing on a phone or tablet. The only consideration is the learning curve. I cannot deny that I'm describing several months/subprojects-worth of work to port the renderer to run within Android, replace the AWT/Swing UI with something that would be intuitive on touchscreens of various sizes, figure out what crowd(s) to make the app appeal to (eg, solely technical focus, or general passive/"arty" demographic)... but if you ever wanted to showcase the project further, given that the architecture is already written in Java, an Android port almost seems like a shoo-in answer. (I'd actually forgotten it was written in Java when I went "ooh, I want to play with this on my phone.") Hmm; I made a wall of text to say "port this to Android". I'm more trying to say, "if you have the motivation, porting to Android may have positive results". :) Thanks for sharing. It's very cool to see the results of sticking to/studying/exploring the depths of the implications of a specific rule system for as long as you have.

dylanz 6y ago

Whoa. As someone who used to "play around" with Line Rider back in the day, I had no idea that was actually possible. That end sequence was amazing! The music score on the ascent was a perfect match. I felt like I was watching the final scene of a James Bond movie or something. I was just about to ask you what the last item was in the track (that meme) but realized I didn't actually read your blog post and just watched the video. WHOA. Major, major props for such a great post to accompany the video with. I'm sharing this with everyone my age that knows what Line Rider is :)

qvq 6y ago

Hi Conundrumer! I was part of the Line Rider community in the early days making manual tracks under the name Holcomb227. Your dedication is really impressive. It seemed like the community had many perfectionists and/or artists and I wonder what they're doing now.

delu 6y ago
Holcomb!!! It's great to meet you again! And yes the community still has perfectionists and artists! Also do you have any of your old Line Rider videos or .sol saves (specifically "The Amazing Nose Manual", "Manuals", "Watch it Now")? If you do, it would be great to get them archived by Rabid Squirrel: https://www.dropbox.com/request/4tqU7np9RJrfu17LvBae https://www.dropbox.com/request/4tqU7np9RJrfu17LvBae (LR Archive context: http://bevibeldesign.com/line-rider-archival-project http://bevibeldesign.com/line-rider-archival-project) If you want to get in contact, my Twitter is @d_e_lu and my Discord is conundrumer#1409
- qvq 6y ago
  Unfortunately the computer I used to create most of my tracks and videos has had its hard drive wiped multiple times throughout the years. I did create a few tracks on my friend's laptop (now broken) so I'll check if that data can be recovered.
  - freeqaz 6y ago
    It's so cool to see these kinds of interactions happen. The size of the internet (and the world) is smaller than you might think! It puts a smile on my face :)
    - jacquesm 6y ago
      Alternatively: HN is a lot larger than you might think it is.
- qvq 6y ago
  I just recovered the data from my friend's laptop. Unfortunately I couldn't find any .sol files for Line Rider. :(

irjustin 6y ago

Omg that was absolutely nuts. I was relatively impressed all the way through and then the polygonal visuals flew by and that just blew me away. Amazing amazing work!

Shared404 6y ago
> I was relatively impressed all the way through and then the polygonal visuals flew by and that just blew me away. Indeed. The polygons were quite literally jaw dropping to me.

codetrotter 6y ago

That is the craziest line rider track I have ever seen. Really good work, kudos!

MivLives 6y ago

I loved your RATIONALIZATION piece linked to in the article.

6510 6y ago

Well done.... ~slow clap~

graderjs 6y ago

Wow the poverty of my imagination 5 minutes ago. I read the start of your blog and I was like this sounds lame and geeky and I imagine some sort of I don't know like Bob sledding like 2D color game kind of weird thing and just sounded weird. And then I watched your video and I was like oh my God. It puts a smile on my face it's cool and thrilling and ASMR and something I'd never even heard about. thanks for helping provide this chance to open my mind to something new and really cool and thanks for like sharing your passion.

endymi0n 6y ago

Hats off for this masterpiece, David — and my congratulations for not letting this dream escape but working your way through to see it bloom to fruitition. I had immediate flashbacks to my old modder days for Jedi Knight and DN3D, I was reminded of the endless fun we had creating worlds out of the puzzle pieces we were handed on our underpowered machines. Playing with GTA3 config settings, cheating physics engines in Stunts, watching the releases of the demoscene with awe. The time was magical and feels nostalgic in retrospect. I feel like pulling out one of my early works and doing the same. Most impressive though I think is the development you did as an artist. Starting from the effect based presentation in your early works, it's wholesome to see you take all of the stuff you learned about physics engines, still top it off with more you've learned along the way — but then let it all take a backseat to telling a story instead. One of drama, hope, despair, struggle and eventually, "escape". Thanks for making my day. There's a drawer in my closet that's labeled "unfinished business". I'm inspired to open it right now.

Agentlien 6y ago
A fellow JK modder? Would you mind sharing what you made?
lloeki 6y ago
> cheating physics engines in Stunts You mean this one? http://www.ibiblio.org/GameBytes/issue20/misc/stunts.html http://www.ibiblio.org/GameBytes/issue20/misc/stunts.html Oh, the hours I played creating the craziest tracks in the undocumented editor barely hidden away behind Shift+F1, reliably making the car hit the ground at a certain angle and speed, triggering a bug (probably an unchecked signed wraparound) that would make it accelerate infinitely into orbit.
- egfx 6y ago
  Oh wow, Stunts! This game rocked. Best Loop de Loop physics ever!

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

Making the video, did you control the character directly or was it like a tool-assisted speedrun? And how much actually requires your own input, given how (iirc) there's some tracks that just run themselves?

an_ko 6y ago
(Not the author, but I've played Line Rider a lot a long time ago.) The character isn't directly controllable. They're affected by gravity, and collision with user-drawn lines. You can also draw "boost" lines that accelerate the character when touching, and "decoration" lines that don't interact with the character.

simias 6y ago

It's always amazing to see what creative people can do with what is very likely a bug in the game engine. I suspect that the developpers of Line Rider didn't originally intend for people to be able to do the majority of the tricks on this track, but we could argue that it would be a lesser game if it didn't allow these techniques. It reminds me of bunny hopping and similar "bugs" in old FPS engines that turned out so popular that they sometimes ended up being purposefully implemented in subsequent engines.

Zancarius 6y ago
> It reminds me of bunny hopping and similar "bugs" in old FPS engines that turned out so popular that they sometimes ended up being purposefully implemented in subsequent engines. Skiing in Starsiege: TRIBES immediately sprang to mind--and the wailing and gnashing of teeth that followed when they tried to reduce/limit it in Tribes 2 (only to add it back in with the "classic" mod).

Aardwolf 6y ago

Is this track also available as a download somewhere to try it in linerider.com itself, rather than as a video? Never heard of the game before, but now I want to try it with this track

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
delu 6y ago
Here it is: https://www.linerider.com/?layers&track=https://www.dropbox.com/s/jiqmax5tq4z7edc/Omniverse%202.json https://www.linerider.com/?layers&track=https://www.dropbox.... It's a big track so might take a while to load. The ending animation doesn't work properly at the moment
- Rapzid 6y ago
  It loaded for me in under 5 seconds or something and runs great; impressive performance. Edit: I'm new to linerider but is it super common to have the tracks set to music? Could be cool to have some basic ability to have a music track in app.
- Aardwolf 6y ago
  Thanks so much for that! The ending worked except for the credits

Daub 6y ago

Brilliant work! This game should be compulsory for all mechanical engineering students. It’s a good way to differentiate between function and ornamentation.

cghendrix 6y ago

Was not expecting my jaw to drop this morning. Well done man, well done.

pradn 6y ago

I’m curious how you were able to remake the game with the same physics. How was that process?

delu 6y ago
I started with loading the save files using an existing JS library. And then, with the help from past modders who decompiled the original Flash version, I was able to port the physics into JS. I had a lot of reference save files to verify if I did it properly.
- pradn 6y ago
  That's incredible, especially given how finicky I imagine porting physics and math from ActionScript to JavaScript to be.

xwdv 6y ago

Is it finished?

delu 6y ago
Yes it's released: https://www.linerider.com/ https://www.linerider.com/ I'm just working on maintenance and adding new features

Rapzid 6y ago

Maybe the best art experience I've had this year; amazing!

junon 6y ago

Incredible. I remember spending hours on line rider as a young'n. The ending sequence blew my mind. Nice job.