[HN Gopher] Show HN: A game that tests how well you know your lo...
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Show HN: A game that tests how well you know your local area
Author : adamlynch
Score : 606 points
Date : 2022-03-19 12:50 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (backofyourhand.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (backofyourhand.com)
| emyeskay wrote:
| Cool game. Add an option to share score (similar to what wordle
| does).
| adamlynch wrote:
| Will do, thanks
| Aachen wrote:
| Title: s/area/street names/
|
| Was already wondering how this game was going to work, like
| geoguessr maybe?
|
| Still fun though! Just not what I expected from the name.
| patrickwalton wrote:
| I can't seem to get it to my area. It's in Ireland and I can't
| find an option to make it go anywhere else.
| [deleted]
| adamlynch wrote:
| Hey Patrick, there are buttons to zoom in & out in the top
| right of the map. You can then click/tap on any town / anywhere
| on the map to set the location.
|
| And it'll remember that location next time.
|
| (You can also click and drag the map to move around)
| sokoloff wrote:
| On iOS, the two finger manipulations (drag and pinch zoom)
| worked very well, then a single tap to place the game area. I
| was pleased at how fluid the map manipulation was; nice work!
| adamlynch wrote:
| Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Thanks, I was worried
| something was broken
| code_runner wrote:
| Love this! Works great on mobile. Awesome idea.
| adamlynch wrote:
| Thanks. I'm glad to hear that because I put effort into mobile.
| I thought it would be my older family members that would like
| it the most and use it on phones or tablets (I was right)
| hackernewds wrote:
| I think this game would benefit greatly if I could just input my
| ZIP code and the map would move over to that starting point?
| adamlynch wrote:
| I see the benefit but:
|
| 1. I was trying to keep the UI very minimal.
|
| 2. ZIP codes are not universal / consistent.
|
| 3. I imagine any API I'd have to use for this would cost me.
|
| I'm not against it though but it needs some thought.
| vmladenov wrote:
| Minor feedback: the game amusingly asked me for the street I live
| on first, so I tapped it, but it said I was 9m away. When I
| zoomed in very close, I saw it was calculating a diagonal from
| the pin to the nearest intersection rather than a perpendicular
| line to the street.
|
| Might be worth accounting for the zoom level for taps / adjusting
| the distance. I did this on iOS.
| bussiere wrote:
| nice concept :)
| adamlynch wrote:
| Hi HN, I made Back Of Your Hand, a map-based game where you're
| given random street names and you have to locate them on the map.
| You can play solo or compete with friends on other devices.
|
| I made it for my dad as a Christmas present. It also gave me an
| opportunity to learn about geocoding, etc.
|
| Tech: serverless, Leaflet, Turf, Svelte, TypeScript, Cloudflare
| pages. I tried to use as many open / free tools as I could. I
| originally used map tiles from OpenStreetMap but they were
| discontinued so it uses Mapbox and Maptiler now.
|
| Questions / feedback welcome. I also wrote a blog post with more
| information: https://adamlynch.com/back-of-your-hand. The code:
| https://github.com/adam-lynch/back-of-your-hand
|
| Warning: it's pretty difficult, unless your streets are numbered
| :)
| rubyfan wrote:
| how does this get my location? I use a Cloudflare WARP+ which
| seems to mask my IP for most sites but this one looks like it's
| using a nearby cell tower?
| adamlynch wrote:
| I don't know exactly but I use the geolocation information
| Cloudflare gives me in my edge function/worker. It's not 100%
| accurate or reliable. Your result can vary minutes apart or
| depending on which network you're on.
| kuu wrote:
| First of all: it's really cool and fun! Congratulations!
|
| As a small feedback: adjustable radius would be more fun. For
| example in the town were I had my childhood, this area is too
| big and takes other neighbourhood/cities that I don't know, but
| for where I live now it fits great.
|
| Again, nice job and congratulations for making it!
| adamlynch wrote:
| Thank you :)
|
| This has come up so much. I'll be adding it, thanks!
| adenadel wrote:
| Another thing is that it seems you are sampling with
| replacement. I placed a circle in a rural area (where I
| grew up) and in one round I got the same street for 3/5 of
| the selections (and there were 10+ streets within the
| radius).
| adamlynch wrote:
| Thanks, will look into it!
| adamlynch wrote:
| For now, I've reduced the circle radius by 20%. I plan to
| make it adjustable in the future.
| jwagenet wrote:
| Dropping a pin close enough on mobile to get 100 points was
| really difficult. I probably was only able to average like 12m
| accuracy even though the pin appeared to be in the correct
| place every time.
|
| I also did my area twice and around 6/10 were either numbered
| or major roads that are very easy to ID. It might make sense to
| deemphasize larger or longer roads and numbered roads for a
| better balance of true local knowledge.
| adamlynch wrote:
| I will fix the pin accuracy issue for sure!
| lostlogin wrote:
| Zooming right in helps, but with 100% knowledge of the
| answers I still got points deducted.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| I'm only getting a blank background on Firefox, both Android
| and desktop.
|
| Edge too, is the service just down?
| adamlynch wrote:
| OK it should be _more_ back now. I migrated from Cloudflare
| functions to a Cloudflare worker. Make sure to clear your
| cache / hard reload though
| adamlynch wrote:
| Yes but it should be back now?
|
| My hosting provider (Cloudflare Pages) seem to have a limit
| on "functions" I cannot increase. I've worked around it for
| now but it might open at Cork for everyone. If so, you can
| zoom out and tap the map to select somewhere else.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| I put my town's coordinates in manually and it's still
| blank, and I don't see anything zooming all the way out.
|
| What do you mean by functions? I would just request
| location with javascript and use Google geolocation as a
| fallback.
| adamlynch wrote:
| OK I'm done with fighting fires for now and can answer
| that last question. Cloudflare offer "functions" and
| "workers", they're like functions that run on the edge
| CDN nodes.
|
| These functions receive geolocation information via a
| function argument. So I've a function that intercepts
| requests to the app, grabs the geolocation information,
| and rewrites the URL (inserting the coordinates e.g.
| /lat,lng).
|
| I go into more detail about this in the blog post but
| originally it just opened in Cork for everyone. I
| disliked the idea of having an annoying browser prompt
| for location permissions. I made it for my dad so having
| no geolocation was fine to begin with and I eventually
| added the geolocation I described above. Less friction,
| no extra client-side requests.
| whoopdedo wrote:
| Those "annoying prompts" are there for a reason. How do
| you justify ignoring the users' wishes with regards to
| accessing personally identifiable information?
|
| Also, why WebGL?
| adamlynch wrote:
| >Those "annoying prompts" are there for a reason
|
| Yep, but not worth ruining the UX for marginally better
| geolocation in my case.
|
| > How do you justify ignoring the users' wishes with
| regards to accessing personally identifiable information?
|
| I don't know what you're referring to. If you're
| suggesting I'd prefer that apps & sites could access our
| location without asking, you're mistaken.
|
| >Also, why WebGL?
|
| The no-streets OSM raster map tiles were discontinued and
| I had to switch to custom Maptiler layers. They don't
| allow raster map tiles on the free plan.
| modeless wrote:
| I found the game easy in an urban area where I've lived for
| only three years, but impossible in the rural area where I grew
| up. It seems to pick main roads in urban areas but in rural
| areas I get random side roads and cul-de-sacs. The circle
| should be much bigger in rural areas because people typically
| drive longer distances. Most of the roads I actually used were
| outside the circle.
| [deleted]
| mohitc wrote:
| I was asked same street twice in 5 attempts
| adamlynch wrote:
| I will be looking into this for sure
| evil-olive wrote:
| this is an awesome idea!
|
| only bit of feedback I have is that the street names may need
| some cleanup / filtering of some kind.
|
| I picked a starting location in downtown Seattle
| (47.60882,-122.33087) and was told to locate "escalator"...it
| seems to have picked the escalator to the Pioneer Square light
| rail station as a "street" to be located.
| adamlynch wrote:
| I've now excluded "escalator", thanks
| darkerside wrote:
| I would suggest using intersections instead of streets. I'm not
| sure how it determines what segment of the street is correct,
| but I had some random guesses score higher than the correct
| street I knew but a part that wasn't highlighted in the result
| set.
| noisefridge wrote:
| Nice and fun. Have you considered points of interest, photos
| from open sources like Panoramio or Creative Commons search,
| links to Wikipedia articles?
|
| Sometimes I get stumped and I also want a picture to explain it
| adamlynch wrote:
| Very interesting. No I haven't, thanks
| TimPC wrote:
| The circle is a bit large as in larger than a single
| neighborhood for my city. I feel like the game is useful when
| it asks you how well you know a single neighborhood. It's less
| interesting when it asks you how well you know 2.5
| neighborhoods.
| bwanab wrote:
| Agreed. I live in a densely packed urban neighborhood.
| There's no way I know streets that aren't main streets more
| than 1/2 mile away.
|
| Cool concept though. This would be a nice game at many
| geographic magnitudes.
| rockostrich wrote:
| It's also kinda silly to do streets for something like
| Manhattan since it's a grid. But landmarks/businesses would
| work really well in any city.
| petschge wrote:
| In my case it covers three different villages...
| adamlynch wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback. I'm considering adding difficulty
| modes or a way to change the radius. I'd rather that people
| wouldn't get a perfect score too easily though
| TimPC wrote:
| I think it's more important for the game to be meaningful
| than difficult. How well do you know a neighborhood is
| deeply meaningful. How well do you know 2.5 neighborhoods
| isn't. I'd strongly recommend sacrificing difficulty for
| meaning here.
| bfung wrote:
| It's def a good positive reinforcement to give people a
| good feeling that they know their own neighborhood.
|
| Having the next 1.5 neighborhood is also valuable: if you
| live so close, it's not a stretch to go learn the
| neighboring neighborhood (in fact, why not!?).
|
| There maybe a level of "insult" (you don't really know
| your 'hood outside of the 5 streets), but used
| positively, I think the game is great.
| mathgeek wrote:
| This is relative to the density of where you are playing.
| The default radius out in rural areas doesn't have enough
| roads, for example. A customizable radius or geofence
| sounds appealing.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| A geofence matching the city limits would be great
| adamlynch wrote:
| Right now there's no backend but potentially I could have
| a leaderboard per geofenced city / town
| adamlynch wrote:
| I agree (and what you want out of the game). I wonder is
| there a "number of streets" which is a better sweet spot
| / a better default, rather than a radius
| adamlynch wrote:
| For now, I've reduced the circle radius by 20%
| adamlynch wrote:
| For now, I've reduced the circle radius by 20%. I plan to
| make it adjustable in the future.
| nannal wrote:
| I want to chime in as well to say I felt the circle was too
| large, I know districts in cities vary in size a lot but,
| but the game covered ~6 with mine in the middle. Checking
| the village I grew up in also covered the edges of three
| towns around it and a neighboring village.
| adamlynch wrote:
| Thanks. For now, I've reduced the circle radius by 20%. I
| plan to make it adjustable in the future.
| SECProto wrote:
| I enjoyed it! worked reasonably well for the city I tried.
| I did have a few nitpicks, but they are mostly datasource
| related as opposed to anything you can control - the
| several rounds i played included a pedway system, several
| walking trails, and a private driveway. Only change I might
| suggest making is the radius of the pin - getting a 99/100
| for being 6m off because the pin didnt go exactly where I
| thought it was. Or is there any way for the pin to snap to
| an object?
| adamlynch wrote:
| Can you give me the coordinates you played in? I will
| review the "objects".
|
| I can do something with the pin too. Probably not
| possible to snap though, no.
|
| Thanks!
| SECProto wrote:
| > Can you give me the coordinates you played in? I will
| review the "objects".
|
| Here's the osm for the pedway object, labelled a
| footpath. https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/11909462
|
| Here's one of the trails:
| https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/511807176
| adamlynch wrote:
| Thanks! (https://github.com/adam-lynch/back-of-your-
| hand/issues/18)
| et-al wrote:
| I think a difference with Wordle is that we're playing
| different neighborhoods and different streets every day, so
| a "cheated" perfect score would have little meaning. And I
| think when people share their Wordle results, it's often a
| "wow, I lucked out on that guess" or "phew, almost didn't
| get it".
|
| Perhaps the ability to choose the sample area could be
| based on the zoom level and hidden under a settings cog?
| kiney wrote:
| I think it would be useful to use actual boundries of
| villages or neighbourhoods instead of circles. Not sure how
| difficult that is. (the required data is in OSM, at least
| in germany)
| adamlynch wrote:
| The data is there but it's difficult to make everyone
| happy. I don't have a backend but if I did, a leaderboard
| per town would be nice
| lcuff wrote:
| Here is a different quiz about what you know about your local
| area. Pretty interesting.
|
| https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-big-here-quiz/
| adamlynch wrote:
| Wow!
| piceas wrote:
| The geography student in me likes that the questions are
| bounded by your watershed.
|
| As someone who grew up in a warm country I am also amused that
| the growing season is hinted as being bounded by the number of
| days from frost to frost.
| mnumber wrote:
| I do after school daycare and this is going to be great for my
| middle schoolers. Not that I dont need to work on all of these.
| bussiere wrote:
| Good concept but the circle on european city may have too many
| streets to know them.
|
| having the option to choose the size of the circle could be nice
| :)
| adamlynch wrote:
| This has come up so much. I'll be adding it, thanks!
| adamlynch wrote:
| For now, I've reduced the circle radius by 20%. I plan to
| make it adjustable in the future.
| hirundo wrote:
| What you get if you live in the boonies:
|
| "There aren't enough streets in this area. Please select
| somewhere else"
| adamlynch wrote:
| Yeah. Someone did ask today to be able to increase the circle's
| radius for cases like this
| function_seven wrote:
| This is a fun game!
|
| I tried 2 areas: where I live today and where I delivered pizzas
| 20 years ago.
|
| 3/5 for my local area, 5/5 for my old stomping grounds. I'm no
| London taxi driver, but I do have a bit of Knowledge about my old
| neighborhood. We didn't have GPS back then and we liked it!
|
| The size of the circle was perfect. Just large enough to
| challenge, but not so large that random tiny streets miles away
| trip the player up.
| imadethis wrote:
| This would be actually helpful practice for first responders.
| FDs/EMS in my area are expected to memorize all of the streets in
| their region, and I imagine it's the same for PDs too. Another
| layer on top of it would be to quiz you on how to get from a
| fixed point (the station) to a random intersection. For the US,
| you could also provide a random block on a street rather than an
| intersection.
| adamlynch wrote:
| Huh, sounds similar to
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30734219. Thanks! I'd love
| to help first responders
| ossusermivami wrote:
| I admin I know nothing of my neighboroud, pretty fun tho and made
| me figuring it out
| taken_every_ wrote:
| Might be better to base this off of buisnesses and landmarks in
| your area. I know mine quite well but fucked if I know where some
| tiny side street with a common name is. Maybe that works better
| with American style suburbs and grid cities, but in Europe it's
| pretty difficult if you are not specifically a delivery person or
| taxi driver.
| quantumf wrote:
| Wow, what a great idea. This is incredibly fun.
| pivo wrote:
| I failed completely because in my selection (US:
| Boston/Cambridge) there are multiple streets with the same name
| like Broadway and First Street, and I always picked the wrong
| one.
| adamlynch wrote:
| If they have exactly the same name then you should've gotten
| points. If so, please give me an example and I'll fix it. If it
| was "Roxbury St" versus "Roxbury Ave", then you're just unlucky
| sorry
| myself248 wrote:
| Yeah, this is killing me. NORTH WOODWARD AVE turns into
| WOODWARD AVE turns into NORTH WOODWARD AVE turns into SOUTH
| WOODWARD AVE turns into WOODWARD AVE turns into NORTH
| WOODWARD AVE completely at random, and none of them count as
| each other. And sometimes multiple parts of the same road
| show up in the same quiz.
|
| I know this is fundamentally an OSM data problem, but it's
| also your UX problem now. (N 42.5, W 83.17 if you want to
| have a look.)
|
| Also it was quizzing me on park trails. And I just got an
| underwater tunnel at the zoo. I guess those are technically
| named ways in some manner of speaking, but they're definitely
| not streets with signs.
|
| All that aside, this is really fun! Personal best 470/500. I
| wish I could make it longer; n=5 is a small sample and my
| scores vary tremendously from one run to the next.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| > quizzing me on park trails
|
| I got one of those too, but I liked it. Nice to explore the
| major bike/pedestrian paths.
|
| I guess it could be an option.
| myself248 wrote:
| Yeah, I figured out it was a park trail, clicked in the
| middle of the only park in the area with substantial
| trails, and actually scored very well on it. But the zoo
| exhibit...
| adamlynch wrote:
| I will be reviewing that definitely. Thank you
| dwiel wrote:
| All the different variations of names of the same road
| definitely made the game too frustrating to play much in my
| area. Simply counting all names that are only different by
| cardinal direction as the same name would solve it. I
| imagine in some places though this would be the wrong
| behavior.
| loeg wrote:
| Dropping a pin directly on the correct street gives a distance of
| dozens of meters -- what? The street isn't that wide.
| adamlynch wrote:
| If you could share more info I can look into it. It might be a
| discrepancy between the OpenStreetMap data and the map I show.
| Hard to say.
| realty_geek wrote:
| Nice simple idea, great execution. I would love to test some of
| my local estate agents to see how well they know their city ;)
| brianzelip wrote:
| Nice work!
|
| > I've always wanted to try a bottom-anchored design, so I took
| my chance.
|
| I know exactly what you mean!
| adamlynch wrote:
| Yessss
| mahathu wrote:
| adam, I loved this and also shared it in my family WhatsApp
| group. we all had a lot of fun playing it, thanks for the great
| idea and execution! one minor suggestion: consider adding a cross
| or some other indicator at the circle of the screen during the
| map selection stage. I found that sometimes you want to move the
| circle a few metres in some direction, but it's difficult to
| guess/tap where the new center should be without knowing exactly
| where the current one is.
| adamlynch wrote:
| Great to hear! Thanks for the feedback. An alternative might be
| to make the circle draggable
| adamlynch wrote:
| I've added a marker to the centre of the circle. Thanks again
| cybadger wrote:
| Hey Adam, it's pretty fun! I agree with some of the other posters
| that landmarks and businesses could be a good addition.
|
| I did have some trouble understanding how it's calculating
| distance and drawing the dashed line. It does not always draw the
| shortest distance from the pin to the polyline for the road. I
| tried a few rounds with some deliberately wrong guesses and I'm
| still not sure I know what it's doing. Some examples:
|
| (1) A road that runs from southwest to northeast. I placed the
| pin to the southeast of the road. Eyeballing it, the shortest
| distance is roughly northeast. The dashed line was drawn 10-15
| degrees east of north. If it's significant, it drew to an
| intersection (not the nearest, but reasonably close).
|
| (2) A road that runs east-west. I placed the pin north of the
| road by 50-60 meters. The dashed line was drawn 15-30 degrees
| west of south. It did not draw to an intersection or other point
| of interest. It may be drawing a ray from the center of the
| circle of interest.
|
| (3) A road that runs north-south. I placed the pin east of the
| road by 40-ish meters, near the north edge of the circle. The
| dashed line was drawn 15-30 degrees west of south (my guess in #2
| about a ray from the center was wrong), to an intersection,
| giving a 102 meter distance.
|
| (4) A discontinuous street. (Replicated for a different street!
| 4th St and 5th St in Marion, IA, if it helps.) The street runs
| north-south but has a quarter-ish-mile gap. I placed the pin not
| far from the southern section of the street. The dashed line was
| drawn from the pin, past (and nearly parallel to) the southern
| section, then connected to the southern tip of the northern
| section. Interestingly enough, the distance looked like it was
| pin-to-southern-section.
|
| (5) A north-south road in rural Iowa taking advantage of the
| 1-mile grid. I placed the pin near the center of the circle,
| slightly less than one mile from the nearest point of the road.
| It drew the dashed line northwest and showed a distance of 2002
| meters. I would have expected due west, and ~1500 meters.
|
| (6) A road that runs north-south (with a bit of southeast a half
| mile south of the circle), that happened to just barely peek
| inside the circle on the far west. I placed the pin near the
| outer edge of the circle, roughly northwest. It drew the dashed
| line nearly due south (several miles!) but reported a distance of
| 281 meters.
|
| Sometimes the distances seem reasonable even if the dashed line
| is drawn to a different point on the road. Sometimes the
| distances and the dashed lines both seem to be off. Intersections
| seem to have something to do with it, but there also seems to be
| something else going on too.
|
| For testing, if you're interested, the intersection of "White
| Road" and "North Alburnett Road" in Iowa (between Marion and
| Alburnett) is great. It's sparse, gives you nice straight roads,
| with just a few driveways and other points-on-polyline to
| confuse(?) algorithms. If you get C Ave Extension just barely in
| the circle on the west, that's #6.
|
| And for what it's worth, I had fun trying to figure this out!
| adamlynch wrote:
| I really appreciate you taking the time to look into this! I
| don't have much more to say _right now_ than what I said to
| this person: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30742704. I
| need to dig into it and see. What you've written will help. I
| might introduce unit tests (with visuals) for this so I can
| sure it works in a lot of different scenarios.
| worstestes wrote:
| Hey Adam! This is awesome! Have you ever considered using
| something like MapLibre as an open source alternative to MapBox?
| adamlynch wrote:
| I wasn't aware of it, thanks. I didn't use Mapbox originally
| but I had to switch after the OSM no-streets tiles were
| discontinued. I'll look into it!
|
| https://github.com/adam-lynch/back-of-your-hand/issues/15
| kfajdsl wrote:
| I basically failed because almost all of the selections were
| random tiny roads in subdivisions (thanks Atlanta sprawl). Got
| all the roads with thru traffic though!
| myself248 wrote:
| Oooo.
|
| Longer roads should score more points because they're more
| important / you're a bigger idiot for missing them? ;)
| Kye wrote:
| Same area. There's a hundred or more tiny subdivision roads
| for every major road. It would be better to omit roads under
| a certain length entirely since it's not reasonable for
| someone to know all the roads in a subdivision they never
| have a reason to visit.
| adamlynch wrote:
| Definitely considering this btw but it might need to be a
| setting
| rsstack wrote:
| I didn't realize it was just going to be street names, and picked
| my area in Manhattan. The streets and avenues are numbered :)
| mypalmike wrote:
| Same in my part of Seattle.
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| I did the same, but got tripped up by clicking on the East side
| of the Island when it asked for "W 14th Street".
| HL33tibCe7 wrote:
| This is great
| mgfist wrote:
| Living in Manhattan is a cheat code for this
| djhn wrote:
| This is great. Works very well for Helsinki.
| adamlynch wrote:
| I've actually heard that before! Kiitos :)
| alistairSH wrote:
| No map loading for me - too much traffic? Safari on iOS.
| fuzzybassoon wrote:
| Same here. It was working when I first visited 10 minutes ago,
| but I got an error at some point and now it won't load
| (multiple browsers, multiple computers).
| Twisell wrote:
| Probably a HN hug of death situation.
|
| The app seem to rely on a third party basemap provider, they
| usually have have a quota beyond which the service will stop
| serving maps for the app.
| adamlynch wrote:
| Yes but it should be back now?
|
| My hosting provider (Cloudflare Pages) seem to have a limit on
| "functions" I cannot increase. I've worked around it for now
| but it might open at Cork for everyone. If so, you can zoom out
| and tap the map to select somewhere else.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Still no map for me.
| adamlynch wrote:
| Thanks. I've confirmed it's back but then somehow
| Cloudflare started served an old deploy again for some time
| and now it's back working again. I didn't change anything.
| Ugh.
|
| https://5fee8b00.backofyourhand.pages.dev/ may be more
| reliable but who knows.
|
| As for the original issue, Cloudflare has a 100k function
| invocation limit and I can't even pay to increase it.
| adamlynch wrote:
| OK it should be _more_ back now. I migrated from Cloudflare
| functions to a Cloudflare worker. Make sure to clear your
| cache / hard reload though
| chadlavi wrote:
| 475/500 in Brooklyn, which I will consider a total success. Neat
| game!
| tkgally wrote:
| Great game. You may have a viral hit on your hands.
|
| A few comments:
|
| I tried it first in Yokohama, Japan, where I have lived for more
| than twenty years. It worked well. Although most streets here
| don't have names, the game called up the names of bridges,
| highways, and even a moving walkway, which was fun. I then tried
| Osaka, which I have visited many times, and it worked well there,
| too.
|
| In both cases, the names appeared in Japanese script, which works
| for me because I read Japanese. If the OpenStreetMap data for
| some locations is multilingual, you might want to give users the
| option of choosing the display language for the choices. Also,
| you might offer a wider range of landmarks for people to choose
| from. In Japan, the names of districts, buildings, parks,
| railways stations, bus stops, rivers, and mountains would be nice
| to include. I tried Manhattan, too, and half of the choices were
| numbered streets and avenues, which got boring quickly; the names
| of buildings, squares, parks, etc. would make it more
| interesting.
|
| In the two Japanese cities, after I entered my choice, the map
| highlighted the correct location with a dotted line leading to
| it; I assume that was the intended behavior. When I tried it for
| Pasadena, California, where I grew up, and Manhattan, though,
| that highlighting did not appear and the dotted line just went
| off to the left side of the screen. I used Safari on MacOS. See
| the following screenshots:
|
| http://gally.net/temp/yokohama.jpg
|
| http://gally.net/temp/pasadena-california.jpg
|
| http://gally.net/temp/newyorkcity.jpg
|
| Finally, a search box to find the start location would be nice.
| It was cumbersome to zoom out, scroll from Japan to Manhattan,
| and then zoom back in.
| adamlynch wrote:
| Thank you.
|
| > even a moving walkway
|
| You've got to love Japan :D
|
| >the OpenStreetMap data for some locations is multilingual, you
| might want to give users the option of choosing the display
| language for the choices.
|
| This is something I planned to. I actually do it for Ireland. I
| show the Irish and English version of the name. And the sign is
| in the style of real Irish street signs. I just need to do this
| for more countries.
|
| > Also, you might offer a wider range of landmarks for people
| to choose from. In Japan, the names of districts, buildings,
| parks, railways stations, bus stops, rivers, and mountains
| would be nice to include.
|
| I'm going to look into expanding the objects but it's tough to
| keep everyone happy. It can be area-dependent.
|
| >that highlighting did not appear and the dotted line just went
| off to the left side of the screen
|
| Wow, not sure what's happened here. Will fix.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| Would be cool if bars, restaurants and tourist attractions were
| added! But a fun little geoguessr like romp either way.
| myself248 wrote:
| Yessss, this is what I imagined from the headline. But I
| suspect the data quality is trash...
| adamlynch wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback! Will look into it
| lwkl wrote:
| This is crazy hard it covers my whole city and parts of the
| metropolitan area. I guess you will have to play this a lot to
| get any good at it if you are living in a medium sized city in
| central Europe. :)
|
| Edit: I think you should be able to make the radius a little bit
| smaller or add an option to choose from different radii.
| adamlynch wrote:
| Great feedback, thanks. I also considered factoring in street
| length for difficulty modes.
|
| My dad has gotten a perfect score a couple of times. Cork isn't
| huge but that's still very difficult. He's a human map
| adamlynch wrote:
| For now, I've reduced the circle radius by 20%. I plan to
| make it adjustable in the future.
| robbedpeter wrote:
| There's a tiny distance between this game and actual mnemonic
| techniques used by world champion memory athletes. Method of
| loci capitalizes on the fact that the brain stores memories
| using a map like structure, as a result of grid cells.
|
| If you can, get a cabby in London with "The Knowledge" to do
| a session. Such cabbies are among elite humans, of a handful
| of disciplines known to alter the structure of their brains
| in a predictable way. Like Shaolin monks, Australian
| aboriginal shamans, and others, they've got an amazing
| superpower.
|
| Neat game, and fascinating peripheral subjects, thanks!
| adamlynch wrote:
| Fascinating, thanks! I knew of memory palaces but I hadn't
| considered taxi drivers! Can't wait to tell my dad someone
| on the internet said he's a genius :P
| robbedpeter wrote:
| Also, your dad is 99% of the way to having an enormous
| "memory palace" if he's got all of Cork memorized. All he
| needs to do is imagine a walk between any two points in Cork,
| then imagine the things he wants to remember at different
| places along that journey, such as at every intersection. To
| recall, simply imagine repeating the journey, and the
| remembered items will be at the intersections. Digits of pi
| or the order of a deck of cards are a good way to test it,
| and the cards bit is great for pub tricks and free beers.
| porjo wrote:
| Another change i think would be helpful for beginners is
| ability to set the road category e.g. only guess tertiary and
| greater roads
| another-dave wrote:
| Yes, +1 on this or if possible start with main roads & as you
| move along get more obscure ones interleaved in so the game
| gets harder as you play
| adamlynch wrote:
| Good idea
| astura wrote:
| Depends on what you're looking for but I think this would be more
| fun if it excluded very tiny streets, like minimum length. I got
| what is essentially a driveway for two houses that's not paved or
| labeled, nobody would know it's name (or that it was a named
| street even) unless you lived on it or next door to it. (I live
| next door to it). Might be less fun if someone got that on their
| first try.
|
| But, again, some people are looking for a challenge, so maybe
| make it an option.
| admax88qqq wrote:
| Now you know more about your local area!
| adamlynch wrote:
| It's interesting seeing so many different opinions on the
| difficulty (whether it's street length, circle radius, etc).
| I wonder would the same people's opinions on GeoGuessr
| correlate or not
| astura wrote:
| No I don't, I said I live next door to it, so I knew it.
| MaceOutWindu wrote:
| Interesting. Did something similar with a self hosted version of
| geoguesser with my friends. We set it up right near our school.
| We have multiple routes walking home and the amount of precision
| we could get was insane. One of my friends was able to get only a
| few meters off from the original position almost instantly.
|
| I hosted it here if anyone wants to try
| https://geoguess.alexmehta.xyz/createmap (advanced map and draw
| your boundaries).
|
| I found it more fun than Back of Your hand just because I frankly
| don't remember too many streets but can recognize the overall
| area from walks I go on.
| humanistbot wrote:
| I kept getting "Alley" for a city with lots of alleys (DC), which
| was very frustrating.
| adamlynch wrote:
| OK I've updated it to exclude "Alley". Thanks
| humanistbot wrote:
| Thanks!
| Jamie9912 wrote:
| How much does this cost to run with the whole Mapbox thing?
| adamlynch wrote:
| First I used OpenStreetMap tiles (and no Mapbox) but the no-
| streets one was discontinued. So then I created a custom map
| layer with Maptiler and used Mapbox-GL because Maptiler's free
| plan only allows that.
|
| I use Mapbox and Maptiler on the free plan. They both have
| limits but I haven't ran into them yet. And I've seen a LOT of
| page views today.
|
| There are probably features I don't use that trigger limits
| more easily though.
| piceas wrote:
| Neat. Unfortunately appears to be limited to streets in your
| local area. I hoped/expected a list of interesting destinations
| in the area such as art installations, parks, or even popular
| restaurants etc.
| adamlynch wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback! Will look into it
| traceroute66 wrote:
| Fun, but you know what would be really cool ?
|
| A Blue Book mode.
|
| For those unfamiliar Blue Book refers to test "runs" done by
| London taxi drivers when they do The Knowledge[1].
|
| It would be fun to be given, say _" Australian High Commission,
| WC2 to Paddington Station, W2"_ and have to place multiple pins
| on the map and then graded on your result.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=my4lDxOCCyg
| adamlynch wrote:
| So is the goal is to mark the route you would take? Sounds
| interesting.
|
| Semi-related, it could show you two pins and ask you how long
| it would take to drive between them at a given time of day. It
| would compare your guess to Google Maps or similar.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > So is the goal is to mark the route you would take? Sounds
| interesting.
|
| Basically yes, the Blue Book works on turns so you would mark
| the turns.
|
| So for the example I gave above (Australian High Commission -
| Paddington) you might mark the turns:
| ALDWYCH CATHERINE ST RUSSELL STREET
| DRURY LANE HIGH HOLBORN PRINCES CIRCUS
| ST GILES HIGH STREET EARNSHAW STREET NEW
| OXFORD STREET OXFORD STREET GT PORTLAND
| STREET MARGARET STREET CAVENDISH SQUARE
| HENRIETTA PLACE MARYLEBONE LANE WIGMORE
| STREET DUKE STREET MANCHESTER SQUARE
| MANCHESTER STREET GEORGE STREET EDGWARE
| ROAD HARROW ROAD HARROW ROAD ROUNDABOUT
| BISHOP'S BRIDGE
|
| > between them at a given time of day
|
| Yes, I guess it could give you extra points for choosing less
| busy routes during rush hour.
| adamlynch wrote:
| Thanks for explaining!
| jedberg wrote:
| I did where I live now, and only got 100/500 (perfect score on
| the major road, no idea where the rest were). I did my childhood
| home and got 99/500.
|
| My suggestion would be to stick to majors and semi-majors (longer
| through streets). It would be more fun that way.
|
| Also there may be a bug, for the one road I got in the second
| try, I put the marker dead center of the entire road, but it said
| I was 4 meters off and gave me a 99, even though the green line
| was under the pin.
| adamlynch wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback. I'll definitely fix the pin accuracy
| and I'm thinking about what to do around street length &
| difficulty
| dataflow wrote:
| > I'm thinking about what to do around street length &
| difficulty
|
| Here's one idea if it might help you get started (though you
| can polish it):
|
| - Mark all "dead ends".
|
| - Mark all private streets.
|
| - Recursively (or perhaps I should say iteratively, depending
| on your POV) mark all roads as X that _only lead_ to
| previously-marked roads.
|
| - Non-recursively, unmark each marked road that is both
| adjacent to an unmarked road AND that satisfies some
| reasonable heuristic (such as "being within 2 intersections
| of the center of your circle").
|
| - Also unmark all freeways/highways/expressways/other
| reasonably-major roads (although few if any of them should be
| marked at this point)
|
| - Delete all marked roads from your list of candidates.
|
| This should ensure that every candidate road actually has a
| non-negligible chance of being at least _seen_ by random
| drivers, and not just by residents who are forced to drive on
| it on the way home.
|
| You can obviously augment
| adamlynch wrote:
| OK thanks but I do need to compute all of this. Plus some
| roads are broken into a lot of segments so I have to do
| more work first in finding & joining them up. Hopefully I
| could do all of it but just saying, it might be too much.
| microtherion wrote:
| Great game! The one "unfair" question I got was "Treppe
| Tiefgarage" which means "Stairs to the underground parking
| garage". Difficult to figure out how to filter these out in the
| general case.
| flicken wrote:
| Similarly, I got a "Zugang Steig B" (Entranceway B).
|
| Maybe adding a button to skip the question: "not really a
| street".
| adamlynch wrote:
| Great idea! For now I quickly excluded "Zugang Steig"
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| I got "tunnel entrance street". There were two tunnels this
| might have referred to. I picked the one on the wrong side of
| town.
| adamlynch wrote:
| Thanks, I've excluded it
| adamlynch wrote:
| Thanks. I've excluded it
| leetrout wrote:
| The streets in my town were not completely highlighted and
| counted off points. I assume that is an issue with how the shape
| is interpreted because the street name changes in a turn that
| isnt a clear intersection.
| adamlynch wrote:
| If you could give me an example, I'll look into it.
|
| I ran into issues like this with a strange streets (described
| here https://adamlynch.com/back-of-your-hand/#the-lioscarrig-
| driv...), so I consider any two streets with the same name in
| the OpenStreetMap data to be the same street. I.e. if you put a
| marker down near any of them, you get points.
|
| However, if the section of road has a different name, then it's
| different.
| leetrout wrote:
| I think the OSM data is bad. Lots of street highlights dont
| match the correct names.
|
| Thanks for the response.
|
| I can look at what you are using from overpass later and see
| what is up with their data.
| adamlynch wrote:
| Great yeah, I was going to suggest we could contribute
| fixes back to OSM if that was the issue :)
| ape4 wrote:
| I am missing something. It started me in Ireland - I am in North
| America
| adamlynch wrote:
| It must not have been able to detect where you are located. You
| can zoom out and click/tap the map to choose the location. And
| it'll remember that location next time.
|
| It defaults to Ireland in this case because I'm Irish.
| ape4 wrote:
| Thanks. Using Firefox on Windows laptop, FYI.
| adamlynch wrote:
| Thanks. It's a third-party server-side API I use so it
| would be just based on your ID address I think. You can go
| here to see where it thinks you are: https://cloudflare-
| pages-geolocation.pages.dev. However, this can change if
| you reload it minutes apart or if you turn on/off WiFi,
| etc. It's not 100% reliable
| ape4 wrote:
| That give me a very accurate location! Not using any VPN,
| etc.
| adamlynch wrote:
| Try https://backofyourhand.com/ again please, it should
| work. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30734844
| for why
| zamfi wrote:
| I was also started in Cork in-game, while this link
| showed me the right location.
|
| I think your integration may have a bug?
| adamlynch wrote:
| Maybe. It uses the geolocation information Cloudflare
| provides. In general, it isn't extremely accurate and it
| doesn't always return the same location, so this doesn't
| surprise me too much.
|
| If it consistently works in one and not the other (at the
| same point in time), then the only difference I can think
| of is that Back Of Your Hand uses their "edge handlers" /
| "functions" and I made that other URL with their
| "workers". Hmm.
|
| ---
|
| Maybe I could inform the user somehow when it cannot find
| a location at all. I really want to avoid a browser popup
| asking for the user's location though
| slobotron wrote:
| Submitted lino includes hardcoded location, maybe that's
| what's tripping people up?
| adamlynch wrote:
| That's it!
|
| I could've sworn I made sure not to include it when
| submitting. It does redirect to that if there's no
| location found so maybe HN updated the link to the
| redirect destination?
|
| I'm pushing a change now to ignore this specific lat-lng
| combination and fallback to geolocation
| adamlynch wrote:
| Try again please, it should work. See
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30734844 for why
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| Same here. Cloudflare link gives me a pin accurate to a
| couple of hundred metres, the link in the submission
| takes me to Ireland.
| adamlynch wrote:
| Try again please, it should work. See
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30734844 for why
| noamchomsky1 wrote:
| map not loading for me.
|
| latest version of chrome. have tried incognito
| adamlynch wrote:
| Yes but it should be back now? My hosting provider (Cloudflare
| Pages) seem to have a limit on "functions" I cannot increase.
| I've worked around it for now but it might open at Cork for
| everyone. If so, you can zoom out and tap the map to select
| somewhere else.
| khendron wrote:
| Why does it insist I live in Cork, Ireland when I live in Canada?
| adamlynch wrote:
| There were issues with my hosting provider. Try again and it
| should be fine. Hard refresh to be safe
| marc_abonce wrote:
| Great game!
|
| One time I got a the same avenue twice in the same round, but I
| don't know if it was a bug in the game or if the data is
| duplicated in OpenStreetMap.
|
| Still great, though.
| adamlynch wrote:
| Thanks, I'll look into that
| ape4 wrote:
| Me too.
| iamtedd wrote:
| In each of the two games I played it asked for the same street
| twice, but it's not like there are less than five streets to
| choose from.
| adamlynch wrote:
| This can happen (rarely I think) but it will be fixed soon!
| [deleted]
| throwra620 wrote:
| Zachsa999 wrote:
| Rural players be like.
|
| Find road 27 W
|
| Find road 59 S
|
| Find road 26 W
|
| Find road 59 S
|
| Find road 58 S
| laurent123456 wrote:
| Not sure the selected area is suitable for a city like London -
| there are just too many small streets in every directions to be
| able to know them all, or even half of them.
|
| It's possibly more suitable in US cities for example that are
| divided into large blocks and large roads.
| sapphire_tomb wrote:
| Oh I don't know. I'm going to send this to a friend of mine
| who's an ex black cab driver. If he doesn't get full marks I'll
| be amazed.
| adamlynch wrote:
| Report back :)
| adamlynch wrote:
| Thanks. I'm considering adding an option to change the radius
| and or difficulty modes which filter out streets by length.
| tuxlifan wrote:
| This is amazing, fun and educational in one package! Thank
| you! Sorry this post got very long ;-)
|
| Having difficulty settings like
|
| * tourist main streets / squares, maybe some
| (renowned - although that might take some additional
| Wikipedia/Wikidata data sources :-)) landmarks if those
| can easily enough be extracted from OSM data
| easter egg mode for s/Paris/your favourite City with
| underground transportation/: find a specific metro station
| :-) (any entrance would count)
|
| * resident "tourist" + smaller streets + any
| street really close to the circle center (15 minutes by foot
| / 5 minutes by car -- oh, you'll just have to add
| flooding algorithm :-) ^^)
|
| * pedestrian "resident" + smaller streets
| everywhere but with greater probability closer to the circle
| center + footpaths (although with them probably lacking
| proper names most of the time that could be hard - but you
| could include e.g. streets from pedestrian zones)
|
| * taxi driver everything ^^
|
| would be great :-)
|
| And then there could be (best optional) penalty modes, too:
|
| * "resident"+: if you pin a street that is
| more or less orthogonal to the target street (say their
| mean directions intersect at more than 45 degrees ; and the
| pin is sufficiently far away (30m / 10% of map height /
| half a block?) from their intersection (if any exists)
| to rule out precision errors) you get only 1/2 the points
|
| * "resident": if you pin a street the wrong
| direction off a main street (and the target street does
| not cross the main street) you get only 2/3 the points
| (i.e. main streets intersecting the plane and you picked the
| wrong "half") "tourist": the same but
| for cities with rivers where you picked the wrong bank
|
| I also found the circle a bit big for my taste/confidence and
| cheated a bit by not placing the circle center at my location
| but so that I would still get my neighborhood but more of the
| outskirts than the city center...
|
| I also got very lucky with the streets, so got 330/500 on my
| first try. One was certainly also due to a square that is
| also used (at some specific times) for car traffic.
|
| As an interesting effect, I got the first street wrong by
| some meters (and orientation :-\\) and the 5th street was the
| same street again. At first I was a bit puzzled, and then got
| full marks for that one :-) I saw that you got the report of
| repeating streets already in some other comment already but
| that experience led me to another idea:
|
| It would be a great learning aid to (optionally) go through
| the (widely?) missed streets again after the 5 rounds.
|
| And if we could even re-claim some (small) amount of points
| for getting them right the second time that would certainly
| help our brains etch in the correct position even more :-)
|
| A small aside: I found it pleasantly devious that the circle
| restricts the scrolling at higher zoom levels! Just in the
| cases where the target street is very close to the border it
| might be nice to relax it a bit though...
|
| And while trying it out on Desktop I discovered a possible
| bug:
|
| While choosing the location, when pressing the "Zoom In"
| button 2-4 times suddenly street names were displayed again!
| Is this intentional so people can easier find their starting
| point? Firefox 98.0 on Linux
|
| My last point:
|
| Would it be possible to export a map view to print it out in
| good quality for offline reconnaissance / tinkering?
| adamlynch wrote:
| Thanks for the kind words and for your time in writing
| this. Great feedback. FYI I'm tracking issues & requests
| here: https://github.com/adam-lynch/back-of-your-
| hand/issues
|
| I love the idea of difficulty modes like "taxi driver".
| That might help in making everyone happy; people have
| wildly varying opinions on difficulty.
|
| >A small aside: I found it pleasantly devious that the
| circle restricts the scrolling at higher zoom levels! Just
| in the cases where the target street is very close to the
| border it might be nice to relax it a bit though...
|
| You're the second person to mention that some amount of
| over-scrolling would be helpful so I'll add that soon.
|
| >While choosing the location, when pressing the "Zoom In"
| button 2-4 times suddenly street names were displayed
| again! Is this intentional so people can easier find their
| starting point? Firefox 98.0 on Linux
|
| OK thanks. I think this is just that the map tiles didn't
| load quick enough and you saw through to the layer with
| streets. I'll look into it soon.
|
| >Would it be possible to export a map view to print it out
| in good quality for offline reconnaissance / tinkering?
|
| I'm not sure what you mean here. Can't you get maps
| elsewhere? Or do you mean the final screen where it shows
| the maps with the 5 streets marked out?
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| I noticed that some areas pop up more than others. Is there
| like a difficulty score that you are calculating in the back?
| Making it easier is definitely a challenge, I'd guess. The
| major landmarks simply matter more.
|
| But, I LOVED playing round after round in Amsterdam, learning
| more about a city I definitely don't know like the back of my
| hand!
|
| MCQs for marked areas would be nice-- guessing the name of a
| place given a location.
|
| Keep going!! This is really awesome.
| adamlynch wrote:
| Nah it's pretty dumb right now. All I do is filter out some
| names like "Alley" and join same-named streets.
|
| I don't want to make it too easy but I have gotten a lot of
| feedback today about difficulty (area boundary/radius,
| street length, etc) so I'll make some changes and hopefully
| I can keep going in the right direction.
|
| Another idea I had was to add hints like maybe you could
| have a special button you could press once per round that
| would shrink the circle for the given street and then go
| back to the normal size next round.
|
| Thanks for the feedback!
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| If you simply calculate the average error, you could A/B
| test the effect of a version with reduced difficulty
| (e.g., with areas with have >5-10% success) vs random. I
| imagine people will play longer when they get some
| correct. What difficulty level do you think is appealing?
| I was at about 5-10%. I think 50% would be more engaging.
| By improving difficulty, you'd have the side effect of
| focusing more on more important locations.
|
| Again, it's super.
| Kibranoz wrote:
| it asked me twice the same street, so you should probably look up
| to avoid that I assume cause it's like free points.
| et-al wrote:
| I love this!
|
| One question, though: how are you calculating distance from a
| street? Here, I thought I was pretty spot on for a street, but it
| still said I was 56m away.
|
| Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/L4usV6W
| kovvy wrote:
| On my map it seemed like the road consisted of a few points,
| rather than the points plus lines between them (or however it's
| described). Selecting intersections (maybe bends?) lowered the
| distance.
| adamlynch wrote:
| Yes this is something I need to fix. I think you're right. I
| think it's measuring to the nearest node on the road (in the
| OpenStreetMap data) and not every point on the line as we see
| it. It could be related to the fact that some roads are
| actually broken up into multiple with the same name, not sure
| Normal_gaussian wrote:
| This is fantastic. My gf and I have been playing it in a cafe,
| and doing abysmally - but just sent it to our parents who will
| greatly enjoy quizzing themselves! Thanks, you've made our day a
| little bit funner and help keep our families a little bit closer.
| adamlynch wrote:
| Glad to hear it! My older family members love it the most.
| Maybe because they didn't grow up with Google Maps
| jokoon wrote:
| Looks great, but I'm curious about the performance of this.
|
| Does it pull vector tiles? Did you build those vector tiles
| yourself?
|
| Seems like your server has a hard time...
|
| I picked my neighborhood since your app located me 1000km away
| from where I live.
|
| I started the thing and it backed away from the former incorrect
| coordinates.
| adamlynch wrote:
| It's "serverless". I don't have a web server of my own and
| there's no database.
|
| The first iteration was very fast. I got 100 in every category
| in Lighthouse (but that doesn't cover everything of course). It
| used OSM raster map tiles. The no-streets map tiles were
| discontinued so I had to switch to using custom Maptiler map
| layers via Mapbox. Still more than fast enough IMO. I
| aggressively cache the Overpass data per area.
|
| Then I migrated to Cloudflare pages to access their geolocation
| information via an edge handler. That slowed down visits
| without a LatLng in the URL because it does a couple of
| redirects.
|
| Then today I had to fight multiple fires due to traffic and
| usage limits. I managed to workaround all the issues as they
| arose but the routing of page loads isn't ideal right now.
| Cloudflare are raising limits for me at midnight UTC so I'll be
| moving back to the faster setup again.
| cerivitos wrote:
| Love it! As many pointed out, playability is quite dependent on
| where you live. Perhaps you could also use landmarks rather than
| streets, but I'm guessing OpenStreetMap POI data is not as robust
| as Google Maps... And Google Maps Places API is expensive :)
| adamlynch wrote:
| Yeah I'll need to look into it and check a few areas
| drusepth wrote:
| I couldn't even find my street to start from. I think it's safe
| to say I don't know my local area.
|
| (I'd probably play a version where you could customize the area
| radius, though! ...I'd probably still lose with a radius of like
| 3-4 blocks, though...)
| adamlynch wrote:
| For now, I've reduced the circle radius by 20%. I plan to make
| it adjustable in the future.
| Ultimatt wrote:
| Scoring is super harsh for the UK where we don't have a grid
| system and a million small streets.
| toxik wrote:
| Found the same, centered on my island of my city and it
| basically only picked tiny streets near the city center and not
| once on my actual island.
| todd3834 wrote:
| This worked great in my area. It was hard enough to make it fun
| but not too hard. I got a score above 90% so I'm stoked
| vmception wrote:
| greater reminder that I need to set up a VPN in a town I know
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Fun "game", but asking you to identify one of the main roads, vs
| some minor, three-house road makes it very luck-based.
|
| Also, I clicked directly on the (correct) road, and it took the
| points away, because the hitbox was off
|
| https://i.imgur.com/yKONWUk.png
|
| (Topniska ulica, Ljubljana, Slovenia)
| adamlynch wrote:
| OK I can try to come up with better randomization.
|
| About the road, this is due to a discrepancy in the
| OpenStreetMap data and the actual map tiles I'm using. Hmm. Not
| sure what I could here. Maybe I can be more lenient when you're
| two pieces of the same road
| ladberg wrote:
| Pretty cool! As a suggestion it might be a good idea to copy one
| of Wordle's simple-but-genius features and make it easy for users
| to share a text based summary of their results with others.
| adamlynch wrote:
| That was a great idea. I'll have to come up with a nice way of
| representing your results
| baliex wrote:
| You could have a look into how https://worldle.teuteuf.fr/
| does it. I'm sure there are better ways but might spark some
| inspiratino at least!
| adamlynch wrote:
| Thanks. Looks like this:
|
| #Worldle #57 X/6 (69%) \ https://worldle.teuteuf.fr
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| This is wonderful.
|
| I used to be a Lyft driver, and something that seemed would be
| interesting at the time is a system, not unlike this one, for
| learning a city. In London to drive a cab you must do this super
| difficult test, and this means cabbies are very knowledgeable
| about the city. This is something in that vein, love it.
| adamlynch wrote:
| Great, thanks!
| divbzero wrote:
| Reminds me of this study [1] from awhile back where brain scans
| at University College London revealed that "part of the
| hippocampus grew larger as the taxi drivers spent more time in
| the job".
|
| [1]: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/677048.stm
| jdavis703 wrote:
| This game was fun, but it's way too easy. I suspect 90% of
| players score over 90 points. Do you have any data on this?
| adamlynch wrote:
| Damn, I should've tracked that. Judging by the responses here
| today, it's both too easy and too difficult simultaneously :/
| planb wrote:
| Scary. From the hundreds of streets in my hometown it asked for 2
| of the 4 where I have already lived.
| adamlynch wrote:
| I made it for my dad for Christmas and the very first time he
| played it was the tiny street where he grew up. He didn't
| believe me that it was random
| aasasd wrote:
| Very nice. I actually wanted to concoct something like this for
| Anki, with large streets of the city--since in this sprawl I
| sometimes only vaguely know what's on the other end of it. But
| didn't think that web maps could serve me for that.
|
| Some minor nitpicks:
|
| - If you could allow zooming in/out with double-tap-and-drag on
| phones, that would be cool. Specifically it would help with one-
| handed use.
|
| - On a 'square', the road can go right around the pin, so the
| distance is measured inside this circle, and I get <100 points.
| Frankly I should've guessed that this would be the case, but
| kinda prefer that the app would do it for me.
|
| - Perhaps there's not much use in offering streets that only have
| like a hundred meters inside the radius--especially since the
| page doesn't allow scrolling outside the circle, to more
| comfortably tap the street and not aim at the small chunk of it.
|
| - OTOH it would be better if I could scroll somewhat outside the
| circle, to have the streets in the middle of the screen where
| it's more convenient to look and tap.
|
| As a side remark: using this in European-style compact cities,
| especially in 'old towns', can be quite a hardcore mode. In the
| 19th century, the region in the circle comprised the whole city
| and some outskirts, so now there are a lot of old streets in this
| area. And with my smaller native city (half a million people),
| the circle covers most of it.
| adamlynch wrote:
| Thanks for taking the time to write all that. Very helpful
| _michaelll wrote:
| Very fun! I managed a score of 450 in the area I grew up in and
| learned to drive in. Definitely the best case scenario for me.
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| This is great!
|
| > The map tiles are loaded in from two OpenStreetMap tile
| providers (one with street names, one without).
|
| You probably don't need to do that. You can use the same tiles,
| the same stylesheet even, and just hide the street names layer in
| code:
|
| https://docs.mapbox.com/mapbox-gl-js/example/toggle-layers/
| adamlynch wrote:
| I'll look into this. Since I wrote that initially, the no-
| streets OSM map was discontinued so I switched to Mapbox &
| Maptiler. But I do use two full layers (one custom one without
| street names) rather than doing what you suggest. Hopefully
| it's not a paid feature.
| dawnerd wrote:
| Crashes iOS safari when moving the map ~40 miles.
|
| Seems like a great game though, going to check it out in my
| desktop later.
| dawnerd wrote:
| Just tried, really fun. Ran into an interesting issue where it
| gave me the same road twice.
| adamlynch wrote:
| I'm going to fix this! Any further info would be helpful
| bredren wrote:
| Well done! Sent it to my pal who likes to go on long walks and
| another who enjoys bicycling the city streets.
| l2silver wrote:
| I love it! Is there anyway to reduce the search radius?
| adamlynch wrote:
| Great! Not yet, but I am looking into it. A lot of the feedback
| has been around the difficulty and the radius. So I might add
| difficulty modes and or a way to change the radius.
| adamlynch wrote:
| For now, I've reduced the circle radius by 20%. I plan to
| make it adjustable in the future.
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