A Game Played In the URL Bar

Kilrah_il writes "Whether you think it is useful or useless, you can't ignored the sheer cool geekiness of a game played entirely in the URL bar. From the article: '... While getting lost in a three dimensional virtual world amongst increasingly thoughtful plot and character development may be an adequate pastime for some, the only new title the gaming world should be talking about is URL Hunter, an experimental keyboard-character based game played entirely in your browser's URL bar.'"

Comments

Better than...

[Anonymous Coward]

Dragon Age 2 by far.

History

[DamienRBlack]

Well that filled up my history nice and good.

Re:History

[arcctgx]

If you're using Firefox it's easy to get rid of all history entries from a given domain. Don't know about other browsers out there, but I guess they should have a similar feature.

Re:History

[Anonymous Coward]

Well that filled up my history nice and good.

Thank goodness for Clear recent history in FF.

Re:History

[Anonymous Coward]

Internet Explorer 6 here. Whats history?

Re:History

[Gamer_2k4]

It's what you're apparently living in.

Re:History

[frenchbedroom]

I just typed the first letters of the url in the address bar, pressed down and then held Shift + Del to clear the entries (using Firefox)

Just don't try using the back button

[nedlohs]

to get back to slashdot.

DO NOT CLICK

[Anonymous Coward]

it's a goatse mirror

Naysayers

[omfgnosis]

Is it a good game? Not really. The gameplay is pretty awful, and the concept is naturally pretty limited. But it's clever and unusual, and highlights something that is both useful and not widespread enough (the ability to set navigation without leaving a loaded page) as well as something that is of questionable utility but novel (manipulation of an interface element that's currently guaranteed to exist in any desktop user agent to act as a presentation element).

People can dismiss it, as they have done and surely will do until this article falls below the fold, but it's pretty neat conceptually. It's not earth-shattering. Just neat.

This is a new game!

[Joe U]

This is a different game compared to the round of 'get around the filtering software' usually played in the URL bar.

I usually win more interesting stuff with that game.

Nice one

[HalAtWork]

I've managed to avoid it for nearly a decade. I can't believe it was the old "color FreeCell bash script" that got me.

Protip

[nethenson]

Use history.replaceState to avoid clogging people's browser history and effectively disabling their back buttons.

Re:O/T: Trusted URL shorteners

[MrWeelson]

I use TinyURL, they have a 'Preview' feature that lets you see the actual URL before visiting the destination site - requires cookies.

Go here - http://tinyurl.com/preview.php - and click the link that says "Click here to enable previews."

Great example for non-techs to highlight bad stuff

[rcpitt]

This is a great example to show your non-tech friends what can be done with the URL bar if they visit the "wrong" site.

Make 'em paranoid - but entertain them at the same time - love it!

Game on IE9 vs. FF4?

[hduff]

Can we get the IE9 and FF4 benchmarks for this? It's important.

Does Not Work

[hduff]

in lynx.

Reminds me of Defender of the Favicon

[wondershit]

DEFENDER played in the favicon.

http://www.p01.org/releases/DEFENDER_of_the_favicon/

Re:Hmm... MOAR!

[netsharc]

That would be easy...

Since all this does is modify the anchor part of the URL (the part after the #) via Javascript, which is basically what Gawker sites (e.g. Gizmodo) do when you click on a story on their right side navigation bar, and using a JavaScript timer to make the a's move periodically, he could incorporate a period where the whole thing disappears.

But, fun stuff. I don't look forward to the SEO & advertising monkeys selling "ad space direct on the user's URL BAR!"

Re:Hmm... MOAR! -- OK (Warning: Huge JS blob)

[VortexCortex]

Amusing for a few seconds, this uses JS?

Yep.

Here, I wrote a JavaScript: URL that creates a Tetris game at the top of whatever page you're on.

URL Tetris

Protip: Create a Bookmark, set the Location of the bookmark to the tetris code... Click the bookmark and play tetris on any web page.

Re:(A) Clever. (B) Boring.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, that is in fact the standard convention for the plurals of lowercase letters:

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/621/01/

I won't call you a punctuation nazi, because Nazis at least made an effort to know their own rules.

For some reason

[93 Escort Wagon]

Not totally sure why, but that reminds me of a very old Star Trek game we used to play on PDP 11 computers.

URL Tetris Source Code

[VortexCortex]

(please excuse the self-reply)
In case anyone wanted to see the source code:
Here's the unencoded version of the URL Tetris.

Re:URL Tetris Source Code

[VortexCortex]

Nice work! Thanks for posting the code.

Thanks for playing.

P.S. I didn't hard code the game size... At the start of the source you can change the variables to create whatever size game you want:
w=10;h=20;s=18;ds=2
w = Number of cell wide.
h = Number of cells tall.
s = Size of each cell in pixels. ds = Drop Slide (Number of drop cycles to wait after the piece has touched down before locking the piece in place).

Just edit those before you press Enter. If you make the game too big and can't close it, hit the [Esc] (Boss Key).

P.P.S. The pieces aren't completely hard coded either. The block array "B" contains a 4x4 bitmap (32bit integer) to define the shape, and a CSS color code for each piece. You can add/remove pieces by adding/removing [int, col_str] elements.

// The relevant code to modify begins @ char column 725 (aprox 1/4th into the code): B=[[0x4460,'#f80'],[0x2260,'#229'],[0x262,'#93d'],[0x462,'#a11'],[0x264,'#091'],[0x660,'#ee3'],[0x2222,'#2ad']];

As you can see the B[0] (the first piece) is [0x4460, '#f80']
The integer is given in Hex... Each hex digit is one row of the piece's block bitmap:
// Least significant bit is in the first row (from top to bottom).
4 = 0100 = .X..
4 = 0100 = .X..
6 = 0110 = .XX.
0 = 0000 = ....
As you can see the 1's make up the L piece, and '#f80' is CSS color shorthand for #ff8800 ( #RrGgBb )
Red=255, Green=136, Blue=0 ( Orange ).

You can make a big gray hollow wedge piece via:
F = 1111 = XXXX
A = 1010 = X.X.
C = 1100 = XX..
8 = 1000 = X...

// The element would be:
[0xFAC8, '#888']
(However, I find just adding one block to any of the standard pieces provides more interesting / lest "FFFFFUUUUUUU--" game play; Big solid pieces and a larger grid is fun too.)

Re:You can selectivly delete history in firefox..

[DavidRawling]

Or just right-click on one of the URLs and choose "Forget about site".

Re:(A) Clever. (B) Boring.

[Lucidus]

Rule 6 from your Grammar Book explicitly uses the apostrophe to show the plural of a lower case letter (i's). Your own references refute you.

Re:(A) Clever. (B) Boring.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, Rule 11 of your own reference explicitly contradicts you. The Wikipedia article does also: "It is generally acceptable to use apostrophes to show plurals of single lower-case letters, such as be sure to dot your i's and cross your t's." The other references simply don't deal with the issue. I would say that you are clearly wrong here, and you should, as they say, stop digging. If you continue to disagree, please write a sentence using the plural forms of the following letters: a, i, and u. Do you see what hapened there? Congratulations, now not only do you know that you were wrong, now you know why.

I've been playing a game in the URL bar for years

[sootman]

It's called "change the numbers to find more porn."

Re:Hmm... MOAR! -- OK (Warning: Huge JS blob)

[mr_mischief]

It's now been tested in Chromium.

The q(') key moves the piece to the right. The enter key drops the piece. The space bar will also drop the piece if there's nowhere to scroll down on the page behind it. The arrow keys do nothing unless there's somewhere to scroll the page left or right, in which case they do.

It's currently unplayable on Chromium due to these issues, but it's still a pretty impressive demo.

Chromium version is 11.0.696.3 (dev) Mandriva 2010.2 for the record. I get the same results from Google Chrome 7.0.517.41 on the same system.

It works well in Opera.

Version information
Version: 11.01 Build: 1190
Platform: Linux System: x86_64, 2.6.36.2-desktop-2mnb
Browser identification: Opera/9.80 (X11; Linux x86_64; U; en) Presto/2.7.62 Version/11.01

Some of the lesser-known browsers:

• Konqueror says it doesn't support the URL scheme javascript: and is explicitly clear about that.
• Arora 0.5.2 (WebKit version: 532.4) plays as Chrome/Chromium do. It's one of those many lightweight WebKit browsers.
• Midori 0.2.6 (GTK+ 2.20.1, WebKitGTK+ 1.2.0) is a lightweight web browser that also plays as Chromium/Chrome do. I see a pattern.
• Epiphany (Web Browser 2.30.5) is another WebKit browser. This one fairs worse than the other WebKit browsers because any single-quote key hit works once for the JavaScript and the next is captured by the browser to open its search feature or type into it. This requires putting focus back on Tetris with the mouse.
• Hv3 oddly enough supports JavaScript but refuses to recognize a javascript: scheme. It doesn't clearly state its distaste for it like Konqueror. It just puts 'http://' in front of it automatically.
• Fennec 1.0.0 (The mobile thing from Mozilla) did run the Tetris interface but not take any input from the keyboard at all. That's probably a bug in the early version of their mobile browser ported to the desktop. The mouse clicks for reset and quit worked fine.
• NetSurf (ported to Linux from RiscOS, this particular one being on a Pentium M laptop with Mandriva 2010.0 as I haven't put it on the desktop yet) doesn't like the URL in the location bar. It also wouldn't load the script properly from a link. The browser has some JavaScript support, but it just doesn't go this far. It officially has only partial support, and this outstrips that. It's no big deal for those of us who use it once in a while alongside bigger, slower browsers that handle much more JavaScript.

So, I think there you have it. You support Firefox and Opera well right now. If you can figure out WebKit compatibility you should be able to waste everyone's time, as everyone should have at least one of Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Chromium, or Safari. If not, WebKit should also get those freaks with none of the mainstream browsers who happen to have Arora, Midori, or some other minor WebKit browser.

My Galeon installation is currently broken and not worth fixing with all these other browsers around, but I'm guessing it should work the same as a really old Firefox since it uses Gecko. I was unable to find a version of it newer than 2006 anyway, and that's ancient when talking about JavaScript in a browser. I read that the project was completely discontinued in 2008.

So, there's a testing report and a brief survey of the randomness installed on my systems for cross-browser testing purposes. HTH. HAND.

Re:(A) Clever. (B) Boring.

[Lucidus]

Oops, I did intend to refer to Rule 11, not Rule 6. So Grammar Book, Purdue, Wikipedia, and the books Eats, Shoots & Leaves and The Well-Tempered Sentence (currently on my desk) all agree with using the apostrophe with lower-case letters to indicate plurals. For upper-case letters, and numerals, usage is currently mixed: formerly, the apostrophe was considered correct; now, it is usually omitted except when this would cause confusion. However, the New York Times, for one example, still uses the apostrophe when pluralizing upper-case letters.