Ever-expanding animation of the life of the 796th floor of a space station

3 years ago (floor796.com)

Reminds me of a game I used to play called Space Station 13. It's a completely unique game. Imagine a giant game of Among Us, but with the engine complexity of Dwarf Fortress. Most servers are high level roleplay, where each player has a role (doctor, janitor, captain, clown, etcetera) and the rounds play out until chaos ensues (theme changes each round, but it could anything from station terrorists to a wizard causing bedlam). This YouTuber really expresses it better than I ever could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URJ_qSXruW0

Everyone has their goals to achieve each round, but it's general havoc. The OP animation really channels the feeling of playing the game.

  • > This YouTuber really expresses it better than I ever could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URJ_qSXruW0

    From the video:

    > You can try taking a painkiller instead, but, it wasn't a painkiller, it was LSD. Having a bad trip? Don't worry, there's a security officer nearby to help! But he can't respond because he was murdered and replaced by a genetically modified monkey wearing his uniform. Hallucinating? Keep calm and focus on what's real. Unfortunately for you, the supermassive black hole expanding towards you is not a hallucination. It is, in fact, very real. _{THE EMERGENCY SHUTTLE HAS BEEN CALLED}_ Welcome to Space Station 13.

    Just wow.

  • > Reminds me of a game I used to play called Space Station 13. It's a completely unique game. Imagine a giant game of Among Us, but with the engine complexity of Dwarf Fortress.

    I rather like games that have a lot of depth to them, especially if they manage to be at least remotely approachable.

    For anyone craving a mechanically interesting single player experience, there's Ostranauts, which sees you trying to make a living in space with your own shuttle, space stations to explore and derelicts to salvage. It is mechanically interesting, if a bit unfinished (early access): https://store.steampowered.com/app/1022980/Ostranauts

    For something a bit more lively, there is Objects in Space (sadly never quite finished in the first place): https://store.steampowered.com/app/824070/Objects_in_Space/

    And for something closer to SS13 that has multiplayer, there is also Barotrauma. In that game, a crew needs to operate a vessel, except that it's a submarine, chaos also ensues: https://store.steampowered.com/app/602960/Barotrauma/

    I've never spent too much time in either of the games, but I admire the concepts and hope that eventually we'll get more (finished) projects like that, even if it's a bit of a niche type of game or audience.

  • SS13 has given me some of the best memories playing games, ever. A playable AI, objectives that each class needs, a few PCs playing sinister characters... it was so. much. fun! My favourite mode was the "Thing" mod, where one player was the "Thing", you could turn into people you killed, but players at the start of the round didn't know which mode it was, so they wouldn't know (until you were found).

    Getting access to the AI and rewriting its rules so it killed everyone on the ship or helped you at the expense of others

    An atmosphere physics system that caused insane lag spikes but allowed you to make bombs with pretty much anything

    Spend a couple of rounds messing with the radiation / gene editing machine to turn people into superhumans

    Be a clown (that everyone hates)

    Honestly, I spent a summer playing this game and it was marvellous. Even with the horrendous lag that the game suffered from.

    It must be about 12 years ago I played this, still one of the best multiplayer games I ever played.

  • The game Stationeers is basically a variant of space station 13[1]. I had a hard time "getting" stationeers. I was ranting about how the game has very good systems, some of the best systems I have seen in a minecraft-but[2], but the controls are very obtuse almost to the point of being cryptic. Then I watched tex[3] play space station 13. and it clicked. I have never played ss13 and I don't suspect I ever will. but the controls are cryptic the way they are because that is how ss13 controls are. The problem is that nobody is playing it correctly. They are playing it like minecraft where you build a base out of first materials. but ss13 is supposed to be played where you try to survive a shift in an already built, poorly understood, prone to exploding station.

    1. A clue is left in the executable name. it's "rocketstation13"

    2. it's a genre. you know how rogue-like is a genre. however this one goes. it is like minecraft but...

    3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lrs8rMbNM3I

  • SS13 is like Eve Online, great fun to read the antics, but a bit of a chore to actually play.

  • Haha I've been really vibing to Sseth's content of late. Thought of this video too.

    10.46 is just testimony to the kind of chaos you can get in this game.

I didn't at first figure out that clicking on each character shows the reference. It feels like exploring someone else's daydreams. Bravo

  • Things I've found clicking so far:

    - Clicking the HEV charger near the start of the food conveyor belt (far left) plays the sounds from Half Life

    - Clicking the middle arcade machine to the north of the HEV charger lets you play that game

    - Further north in the shower area there is a camera in the shower gag if you click on the shower area

    - Slightly to the east just past the gym sign there is a bunny girl sign which plays a song when clicked

    - To the east past the avatar tree Chuck Norris has a click effect.

    - To the far east of the map there is a guy between Jabba and Kenny with a synthesizer who will play one of many tunes when you click

    That's all I found!

  • I happened to be browsing this morning, early with everyone asleep when I clicked on the duke nukem kill me girl. Scared the *&^# out of me when. My volume was way to loud...

Really cool. Reminds me of Goon Tower from many years ago, where the levels were made by various different members of the SomethingAwful forums:

http://web.archive.org/web/20130416221448/http://www.goontow...

Made by a Russian who grew up in the USSR?

Reasoning:

https://floor796.com/data/misc/kvass.jpg

https://floor796.com/data/misc/kin-dza-dza.mp4

Too obscure.

https://habr.com/ru/companies/floor796/articles/673318/ - The process of creating a project is described here. The material is called Rendering a large animation in the browser or how I left mp4 to my own video format

  • English link: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&hl=en&u...

    Unfortunately, while this is very interesting, it's not how the site appears in my mobile browser. I'm seeing a series of standard MP4 files (the loading animation is also different, showing a series of vertical bars instead of a percentage), and while I have no problems with playback speed (everything seems properly timed), the videos themselves are positioned incorrectly--there's a line every 3rd or 4th video file where it slightly overlaps[0]

    This might be due to my choice of browser/settings (Mull), however, as it's probably preventing use of the canvas without input...

    [0]: https://files.catbox.moe/wps867.png

First thing I saw was Superman beating up Homelander and the rest of The Boys villains while Saitama and Mob Psycho look on and Indian Superman dances in an ad in the background. This just reminds me of how much of my mental real estate is used up on pop culture, really.

  • I took a biology class that involved going over the organelles of the cell in 5th, 8th, and 12th grades as well as online for university (it seems to be treated like the most critical category of knowledge in all of biology). I think I still remember half of those dozen or so.

    But give me a notepad and an hour and I can still list all 151 original pokemon.

    There's a post on the front page right now (as there often is) about spaced repitition to improve memory. It's funny how hard we have to try to hold on to things when we're so well equipped for it naturally. The problem is we struggle to change which things are truly important to us, and it's how much we care about something that decides how long we'll hold onto it.

I just happened to check in on it today! Updates seem very frequent so I usually take a look every few weeks. As another comment mentions, this is the project of one Russian guy. Which is interesting because despite our presumably very different cultural upbringings, I feel like I "get" nearly all of his references. I wonder how common it is for Russians to have exposure to so much US/Western/Japanese media.

Also - you can click on "Changes" in the top bar and there is a searchable list of every update.

  • Infection by American pop culture is a global scourge.

    I don’t even necessarily only say that because of the corrosive and low quality nature of Americas pop culture that is like a drug that feels really good at first, but causes damage over time (see false beliefs about reality people hold solely due to TV/movies). What is even more pernicious and pervasive is that Americas pop culture is like a cultural virus that is eradicating diversity of culture just like immigration and this fake general “diversity” is actually eradicating the thing it claims to itself be.

    Everyone, everywhere, at all times all consuming the same things and muddled into an indistinguishable mass is quite literally the opposite of diversity. American pop culture is really the nexus of that process, the killing, destruction, and eradication of local and native cultures. In many ways we don’t even have the language for what is happening, and considering the ongoing stupefaction of society, I suspect it will never be developed. It is a kind of mass extinction event of human culture and diversity, going on right now, under the fraudulent and false guise of “diversity”.

    • I am mystified as to how anybody could say this who has been... bloody hell, anywhere. Go spend some time in India, Indonesia, Singapore, let alone China or Russia, and tell me that it's all being eradicated due to American culture. I mean, even like, France.

  • I think this was posted about three months ago. The number of rooms has increased by a third in that time? It's cool but it's not what I was expecting for ever-expanding.

    Like a lot of people, I didn't know about clicking, so at first I thought it was just a generative system and was expecting it to get bigger. Only around the time I started trying to figure out what the big deal was did I begin to focus on what the characters were doing and noticing the pop culture references.

  • > I wonder how common it is for Russians to have exposure to so much US/Western/Japanese media.

    I feel like internet-savvy Russians have lots of exposure.

I appreciate the author including a high quality source map.

Looking through the source of this is really interesting.

Very well written, looks like vanilla js, with less for css. The components are very easy to reason about and all just do direct DOM manipulation, I like it a lot.

The only thing I might have done differently is that I think it would have simplified the code base a little to use Web Components custom elements (not shadow dom) as the unit of component encapsulation, but this is a nit - the author makes effective use of templates for instantiation of dom elements, so that could have been a bit more complex with WCs, as you'd have to wire it into the connectedCallback lifecycle event.

I love everything else about this code base, the use of jsdoc for types instead of typescript, the organization.

It's really a breath of fresh air - so refreshing to see an example of a quality code base that avoids frameworks, and almost any dependency. The only js dependency I see is on handlebars.

TIL that I'm way out of the loop on a lot of pop culture. I maybe understood 1 reference in 20. Turns out that I'm most familiar with 1980s pop culture (that of my teenage years).

  • I’m kinda having the opposite experience - I don’t think of myself as someone who’s particularly well read on pop culture, but I’m actually recognizing most of this, even some real weird ones.

I don't know how long the author has had this project going, but part of the fun of exploring is how the pop-culture references give a clue as to the maximum age of any particular section. E.g., the shower stalls with the Squid Game characters can't be older than late 2021, while the "Stable Diffusion-powered" surgery robot that's giving the patient ten fingers on a hand must be from the past 6-9 months.

A word of caution: I opened this on my phone (firefox on android) and it caused it to immediately grind to a halt to the extent that it had to be force restarted.

I liked the Fruit Jedi. More fun to watch than... at least 3 out of the 9 main Star Wars films if you ask me.

Really cool.

No Blade Runner?

Also they need a Vorlon in there somewhere.

Spent hours looking… what fun!

This is insane. What techniques are you using to animate it? A lot of people will pay for an AI which animates still 8-bit MJ generated pics.

This is beautiful, and a good example of art that generative AI will never be able to replicate.

  • What makes you say this? Even if not in totality, I could well imagine that an AI painter might be very well suited to being a copilot for this type of project.

    Think dall-e image extender + style transfer + pop culture knowledge of these characters + some human seeded descriptions of the scenes.

This "ever expanding" was misleading the first time it got posted and it still is today. Manually adding a tile once in a while doesn't make it ever expanding, or otherwise literally every website could be qualified of "ever expanding".

  • Why do you read it so literally? It's the artist expressing their intention that the work is unfinished and being added to by others than the original artist themself

    "0x00 says, that it took 3 years to make the project look like it looks now. 1 year was spent on development and 2 years to create the first 8 bays. Now though, that everyone can add any bay and doesn't have to deal with programming, the author hopes that the project will continue growing exponentially."

    • Because I, and probably most, believe from the title that you can pan infinitely in any direction, but it's not the case at all. Remove "ever expanding" and it looks a lot of its appeal. I wouldn't click without it. It's clickbait.

      2 replies →

  • It was misleading to me too, at first, given the current AI hypetrend, but "ever expanding" still makes sense here, and I prefer this more manual sense of "ever expanding" - the term doesn't deserve to be poisoned by AI hype.

  • Adding a tile once in a while literally does make it ever expanding.

    Most other web sites are ever growing collections of things, not an ever growing thing.

    The description is neither misleading nor even non-sequiter. It's applicable and one of the primary notable properties.