YHK - yet another hacker news clone

2D Vehicles

113 points Michelangelo11 3 days ago 28 comments

rrr_oh_man 1 hour ago | parent

  > .eyebrow, .label {
  >  font-size: 0.78rem;
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  >  letter-spacing: 0.19em;
  >  font-weight: 750;
  >  color: var(--accent);


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Just give us the prompt..

VMG 56 minutes ago | parent

No, I don't want to see the prompt. Yes it has some llm tics, but it's clear that he went back and forth before arriving at this. Why would I be interested in the transcript?

whateveracct 42 minutes ago | parent

Pangram says the first half is human and second half is gen AI.

Ran out of steam, I guess...

forrestthewoods 23 minutes ago | parent

yes and? someone sharing the details of an extremely popular project is super cool. comments like this will not encourage more people to share more cool things.

I'd be ecstatic if more people used AI to share more cool things they've done. that'd be awesome. more of this blog post please.

fxtentacle 36 minutes ago | parent

I'd say you're fully off the mark here. That page contains serious architectural insight on how to make a "designed" car feeling work within a "physically correct" collision engine. Getting the balance right is super hard and he explains how to do it. I'm confident no AI could do that architecture, so this is most likely hours of hard work with a thin layer of LLM gloss on top.

NewsaHackO 1 hour ago | parent

>One weekend in late August 1996, I wrote a 2D physics simulation which later became the basis of the vehicle system in the eventually popular game "Grand Theft Auto" aka "GTA".

I don't mean to be... judgemental, but if you had the talent to go something like this, why devolve on the remake? One could think that a person with your level of skill would be one of the main vanguard for hand coding. Again, I don't want to be too judgemental, as I am not a great programmer and use assisted tools when planning and designing personal apps, but I am just curious.

GaryBluto 1 hour ago | parent

Why needlessly do extra work when it's easier than ever before to modernize what is already made? Why would he want to be a vanguard for "hand coding"?

DonaldPShimoda 52 minutes ago | parent

Sometimes the reward lies in the doing, not in the done.

zeven7 37 minutes ago | parent

He's already done the doing.

DonaldPShimoda 20 minutes ago | parent

Yes, I recall well the famous words of Claude Monet: "Well, I painted one scene of water lilies. That should be more than enough for a lifetime."

AustinDev 37 minutes ago | parent

And for that same reason people knit their own scarves but they don't expect the scarf they see at the store to be hand knit.

croes 8 minutes ago | parent

And sometimes not.

Seems the author chose option 2 and focused on the article instead.

bradharris 26 minutes ago | parent

I've been a developer for not nearly as long as the author but long enough that at some point it felt like I was writing the same code and same abstractions over and over again and sometimes a new novel problem would reinvigorate my love of programming but today I'm happy to let an LLM write the tedious code while I give the more fun high level architectural direction and when reviewing the code sometimes I'll give it a nudge in a different direction. I suspect the author has written code like the 2d car physics many times over. Just my 2 cents.

slowin 1 hour ago | parent

It still feels great to play! I love the history too, it's actually a great example of why prototyping "toys" is so important in product development. It allows you to play with isolated concepts without baggage or the expectation to make things production grade. Just getting straight to the point.

Great story, programming and mechanics.

londons_explore 36 minutes ago | parent

This is what taught me how to do handbrake turns.

And shortly after I learned how expensive tyres were, I stopped doing handbrake turns.

bita_nidir 25 minutes ago | parent

GTA didn't exist back then, so I had to learn them from the lore.

And shortly afterwards, in addition to all the different physics-in-action experience, I learned about how car insurance excess works.

joshu 36 minutes ago | parent

no dynamics model (uses bicycle model) but i built a solver for parking

http://truckslop.joshu.dev/

murkt 24 minutes ago | parent

This is pretty fun!

hendry 34 minutes ago | parent

Feels like the original, just need some thing to run over.

gaghak2010 30 minutes ago | parent

It's an interesting project, although not a physics expert I am so curious what the original version looked like!

codeulike 26 minutes ago | parent

Interesting that he namechecks Thrust from 1986, an absolutely amazing game for the BBC Model B, and I guess the first 'physics' game I ever encountered. The 'towing' physics were amazing.

https://youtu.be/Dt44PEIWBRg?is=CbVTRyDfo8Nt56fH

Thrust was by Jeremy C. Smith who went on to work on Exile with Peter Irvin

iammjm 25 minutes ago | parent

Really nice. GTA 1 & 2 were really amazing. I had a lot of good times with them.

andremendes 19 minutes ago | parent

If you accelerate the Car, then switch the configuration from Car to Brick, the brick won't slow down. Not sure whether is it intended but it feels wrong.

jryb 16 minutes ago | parent

d doesn't turn right for me, but shift+d does. Arrow keys do work though.

MisterMunchkin 14 minutes ago | parent

Even that little simulation is really fun. I’d like to play a little 2D game with this mechanic.

Cadman021 13 minutes ago | parent

I liked your idea. It was really cool.

bita_nidir 9 minutes ago | parent

Nostalgic!

It'd be amazing to hook is up with the engine sound simulator: https://github.com/ange-yaghi/engine-sim