> The creation of Floor796 started in 2018. I spent the first year creating the animation editor, the rendering engine and the site itself. Then I started drawing the first characters. I drew slowly at first, as I had to get used to the projection and constantly improve the animation editor. I've been creating the first block for over 8 months. Now I draw 1 block in about 1-1.5 months.
Author made everything, including the editor, by himself.
The source map is there. The whole thing is made with JavaScript and with very little (pretty much no?) dependencies. No React, No TypeScript, No 54.643 packages to download. He seems to use lesscss but that's about it.
Sometimes I wonder if we lost the art-craft in all of this frameworks mania. This work has better performance than 99.9% of the apps out there despite being reasonably complex (UI-wise). I legit though this was built with WebAssembly at the initial interactions.
I learned of this site via HN a few years back and someone mentioned that the author must be Russian and mentioned the characters from Kin Dza Dza. A quick search revealed the film is freely available on Youtube with English subtitles. It's a great film and thankful for floor796 in revealing it as well as being an amazing work of art.
Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but it would be more correct to say that the author/artist is likely from a country that uses the Cyrillic script.
This has been making the rounds for the years and I think what captivates me the most is the art style. There is something about it I cannot put my finger on. Just like the art style of Moebius or the 90's game Flashback.
I thought for sure this was eBoy at first. The style is similar and eBoy has been around forever but looks like it’s just someone else who is really good at this stuff.
For some time recently, I was zooming in on Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights. The floor's level of interactivity would be so nice there. At least on this floor, I can guess what's going on quite reliably. The experience is quite similar at some level though. I saw Bosch's originals (or 1-to-1 by size repros) many years ago and without zooming in, it was incomprehensible. With zoom, the details are overwhelming.
Note this digitisation was by a company called Mad Pixel, and supported by Google in 2009. It was the first experiment that later became the Google Art Project in 2011 (now Google Arts & Culture).
The entire page was amazing, but holy shit that art in the middle that shows how the current system works where kids are sent to school to study and then they graduate, get crushed into becoming mere tools instead of the human beings we are meant to be.
Also there are a lot of special clickable actions (mentioned in the FAQ > About section, or just keep clicking until you find something, there are 20+ special actions).
Is it just me or is the phrase "human beings" used more often than simply "humans"? I've just started to notice this: the next word after "human" is very often "beings". Whenever someone wants to emphasize our humanity (as opposed, say, to a horse's horseness), they almost always say "human _beings_" instead of "humans". Somehow "human beings" seems to emphasize the "human spirit/soul".
And recently even dropping the negation itself while keeping the meaning: “je sais pas”
I never thought about that. Interesting. This negation related cycle is apparently called Jespersen’s cycle and happens in many languages. The English equivalent
From the FAQ in the "about" section of the website:
- You can try to find Wally (Waldo), as in the well-known game Where's Wally. He is partially visible, but if you click on him, he will appear in full and wave at you.
- Quest #1 - Mafia Treasures. To start the quest, go to the room where the Mafia is holding the annual meeting and click on the suitcase.
- Quest #2 - Subspace Tuner: To start this quest, click on the large advertising screen that says 'Bad Signal' next to the pirate ship.
- Payphone - you can call different subscribers on the 796th floor. Subscriber numbers are constantly being added and can be found in various places on the floor.
- In the Police Station click on the big screen to see the project statistics: current online, visits by country, number on interactions with all elements on the floor, etc.
- One of the arcade machines has a real game - Racer796.
- In the park zone there is Change My Mind guy. Click on him to add your own phrase to the rotation.
- You can compose a 10-second melody and add it to rotation by clicking on the guy in the hospital with the pink synthesizer.
- You can draw small pixel animation and add it to rotation by clicking on the Fun Drawing Screen near the Police Station.
- Click on the Chunk Norris in the park zone.
- Click on the JAWS 19 ad screen in the block with Back to the Future references.
- Click on Naruto near the pirate ship.
- There is Free Ads Board next to the pirate ship. You can draw your own advertising screen and specify which URL it links to.
- There are also many small interactive elements on the floor, clicking on which will show an additional picture, play a sound or cause some action to occur.
Thanks for sharing this one. There's so many brilliant and funny little vignettes in this piece. I'm amazed at what some people are able to do, so far outside anything I could dream about creating.
Would be interesting to give all the NPC AI, then control one and see how everything interacts, or get dropped into this in first person and interact with everything/everyone powered by AI.
Is Waldo really there? Because I've looked everywhere, and at this point I'm a bit concerned that my eyes are going to give out before I'm able to find him. That guy sure is a wily fella.
I managed to find him without help - I'm stubborn - but man, did it take me a long time to do it. It didn't help that I was constantly being distracted by some new character grabbing my attention. There's just so much here!
There is now a neon add for some weird place called 'Hacker News'; right between the ones for Dunder Mifflin and Weyland Yutani Corp, over by the Catbus, behind that new huge pirate ship, but if you hit the Black Mesa ad you've gone too far.
the guy must have started consuming media in the womb and has an amazing ability to capture iconic characters and moments with the smallest possible numbers of pixles, the proof of that is bieng able to identify many familiar characters, but the ones from different cultures register as extras and are devoid of personality, pattern recognition doing it's thing effortlessly.
It's very much of our time, and speaks to the need for drama and absurdity, and also the role that AI is bieng pushed to fill, while showing that for true iconic imagery , human biengs still have the edge.
Mega gif indeed. Two relevant excerpts found in the about page (it's a gif but not a gif):
> Why 796?
> The name of the project has a small code: 7, 9 and 6 are the ordinal numbers of the letters in the English alphabet for the word GIF. This project is essentially one big gif, a mega gif, so all the action takes place on the 796th (GIF) floor of the space station :)
> How does animation rendering work?
In order to maintain pixel clarity and still have good compression, it was necessary to create own video format. The entire animation is divided into sections, and each section is packed into this special format. The browser then loads the desired section and renders it in a separate thread into the common canvas.
Amazing, real dedication and it looks so good! Have spent some time just wandering around and clicking on different characters I don't recognize.
So fun
> You can try to find Wally (Waldo), as in the well-known game Where's Wally. He is partially visible, but if you click on him, he will appear in full and wave at you.
just win10 and firefox. It wanted to run workers in firefox, locked up firefox, then somehow taskmanager was locked up and things went downhill from there.
One of my soft milestone tests for AGI is if this gets reproduced in a World Model with Gaussian Splats or whatever it is by then that lets you do gameplay walkthrough in first player egocentric 3D-6DOF-360 view in XR with some friends till then its just all stochastic parrots on word calculators whats the point
Author has a YouTube channel too somewhere where you can see him making a drawing start to end. (edit: https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCribkEGzOuMQ9ozb0ektMCQ)
From FAQs
> The creation of Floor796 started in 2018. I spent the first year creating the animation editor, the rendering engine and the site itself. Then I started drawing the first characters. I drew slowly at first, as I had to get used to the projection and constantly improve the animation editor. I've been creating the first block for over 8 months. Now I draw 1 block in about 1-1.5 months.
Author made everything, including the editor, by himself.
Sometimes I wonder if we lost the art-craft in all of this frameworks mania. This work has better performance than 99.9% of the apps out there despite being reasonably complex (UI-wise). I legit though this was built with WebAssembly at the initial interactions.
From 2023 article https://www.cartoonbrew.com/tools-of-the-trade/floors796-pav...
The guy was active on Reddit a week ago https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/1pqktaj/new_block_56_...
https://www.eboy.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Garden_of_Earthly_Delights...
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qs35t2xFqdU
edit: Ha! Actually one can double-click on objects and get more info about their origin.
Also there are a lot of special clickable actions (mentioned in the FAQ > About section, or just keep clicking until you find something, there are 20+ special actions).
Tuna fish, chai tea, Enter the room -> enter “into” the room, French: hui (today) -> aujourd’hui (day of today)
Keyword: pleonasm
I never thought about that. Interesting. This negation related cycle is apparently called Jespersen’s cycle and happens in many languages. The English equivalent
I say not -> I “do” not say -> I don’t say. -> ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jespersen%27s_cycle
- You can try to find Wally (Waldo), as in the well-known game Where's Wally. He is partially visible, but if you click on him, he will appear in full and wave at you.
- Quest #1 - Mafia Treasures. To start the quest, go to the room where the Mafia is holding the annual meeting and click on the suitcase.
- Quest #2 - Subspace Tuner: To start this quest, click on the large advertising screen that says 'Bad Signal' next to the pirate ship.
- Payphone - you can call different subscribers on the 796th floor. Subscriber numbers are constantly being added and can be found in various places on the floor.
- In the Police Station click on the big screen to see the project statistics: current online, visits by country, number on interactions with all elements on the floor, etc.
- One of the arcade machines has a real game - Racer796.
- In the park zone there is Change My Mind guy. Click on him to add your own phrase to the rotation.
- You can compose a 10-second melody and add it to rotation by clicking on the guy in the hospital with the pink synthesizer.
- You can draw small pixel animation and add it to rotation by clicking on the Fun Drawing Screen near the Police Station.
- Click on the Chunk Norris in the park zone.
- Click on the JAWS 19 ad screen in the block with Back to the Future references.
- Click on Naruto near the pirate ship.
- There is Free Ads Board next to the pirate ship. You can draw your own advertising screen and specify which URL it links to.
- There are also many small interactive elements on the floor, clicking on which will show an additional picture, play a sound or cause some action to occur.
https://habr.com/ru/companies/floor796/articles/673318/
https://pine.town
Obviously nowhere near as good as Floor796, but if you like pixel art, maybe you'll like my weekend hack.
Edit: I absolutely did find Waldo! That was fun.
https://floor796.com/#t5l1,459,106
He's in the bathroom stall.
Had to look up who that was and then just searched for the red hat.
https://xkcd.com/1110/
I am pleased things like this continue to exist on the tinterweb.
> Why 796?
> The name of the project has a small code: 7, 9 and 6 are the ordinal numbers of the letters in the English alphabet for the word GIF. This project is essentially one big gif, a mega gif, so all the action takes place on the 796th (GIF) floor of the space station :)
> How does animation rendering work?
In order to maintain pixel clarity and still have good compression, it was necessary to create own video format. The entire animation is divided into sections, and each section is packed into this special format. The browser then loads the desired section and renders it in a separate thread into the common canvas.
Would make a great animated wallpaper.
I bet there's Waldo hidden somewhere... good luck!
> You can try to find Wally (Waldo), as in the well-known game Where's Wally. He is partially visible, but if you click on him, he will appear in full and wave at you.
Probably somet=ing gone very wrong with the video drivers.
I guess that's on a different timeline than the former? S Whisman location. ;)
That being said whatever this is… something