Show HN: Artificial Ivy in the Browser

Posted by dnmc 4 days ago

This is just a goofy thing I cooked up over the weekend. It's kind of like a screensaver, but with more reading and sliders. (It's not terribly efficient, so expect phone batteries to take a hit!)

Comments

Comment by seszett 4 days ago

Very nice, I could suggest two more factors influencing growth that are important for plants: geotropism and phototropism.

Geotropism basically makes plants grow away from the source of gravity, and phototropism makes them grow towards light (and that is usually reversed for roots).

Comment by seszett 4 days ago

To OP, I don't know why but you're apparently shadowbanned, and your comments appear "dead" even after vouching for them.

Probably an automated heuristic, you might want to send an email to mods so they can reverse it.

Comment by solarkraft 4 days ago

I vouched too, the two comments seem restored now.

Comment by dnmc 4 days ago

Oh, those are great ideas. On that note, I was also considering simulating nutrients and rewarding the roots that find them.

Comment by bartvk 4 days ago

I appreciate that it's beautiful and awesome, but when the complete screen was filled, I wanted a flamethrower option.

Comment by dnmc 4 days ago

Hah, believe me, the flamethrower feature is first in line for the v2 milestone!

Comment by bartvk 4 days ago

I'd like it but don't listen to me and please just stay in love with programming because this is such an awesome little project.

Comment by saaaaaam 4 days ago

It would also be really nice if you could snip bits, pruning what is growing - with cuts causing something different to happen...

Comment by ErroneousBosh 4 days ago

Don't you know that you can just drive a Ford C700 refrigerated van through it instead of mucking around with messy dangerous flamethrowers?

Comment by spuz 4 days ago

This completely killed my OS and nearly took the PC with it. It started running ok but as it filled the screen, the FPS dropped and then my browser stopped responding, then the mouse started moving VERY slowly and then the screen went black and my Bluetooth got disconnected. At that point, even long-pressing the power off button did nothing and I had to switch off the PC at the wall...

I am going to put the blame on Firefox and Linux Mint but it's honestly impressive how a simple animated simulation can do this.

Comment by dnmc 4 days ago

Oh no! I can run it on my phone, which is a few years old, so I figured it wouldn't lock anybody's computers up.

It's pretty CPU-heavy because it's constantly creating and updating SVG elements. I may attempt to rewrite sometime with WebGL and shaders :)

Comment by DANmode 2 days ago

Check out Canvas 2D if you haven’t.

Comment by butvacuum 4 days ago

I have never seen a long press fail to cut power- assuming it works at all. I've never heard of it being tied to CPU state.

Comment by Nevermark 4 days ago

It's beautiful. Both the general texture created and the wave effects.

I would love to be able to control speed. I am curious what the waves would look like at very high speed.

As a wallpaper, a slow speed would be great.

Nice work.

Comment by namtr2810 4 days ago

That's awesome! could you add a functionality so that I could control the color of the lines?

Comment by totetsu 4 days ago

many years ago I used the safety filter data set from google quick-draw to do something similar with dick sketches.