[HN Gopher] Show HN: I remade my website in the Sith Lord Theme ...
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Show HN: I remade my website in the Sith Lord Theme and I hope it's
fun
I used the time over Christmas and in between the years to redesign
my website. This time I decided to make it in the theme of an evil
Sith Lord that commands the Galactic Cookie Empire, because I found
my previous cookie consent game a bit boring after a while. Here's
the website's welcome page and the cookie consent game:
https://cookie.engineer/index.html (the cookie consent game isn't
started on any other page of my website, only on the welcome page)
I also made a "making of" weblog article series, in case you're
interested in the development process and how I implemented it and
what kind of troubles I went through already: - Making of the
Game: https://cookie.engineer/weblog/articles/making-of-my-
website... - Making of the Avatar:
https://cookie.engineer/weblog/articles/making-of-my-website... -
Debuggers to toy around with:
https://cookie.engineer/design/consent/index.html It "should" work
on modern browsers. I tested it on Firefox on Linuxes,
Chrome/Chromium on Linuxes, and Safari on Macbook. Don't have an
iPhone so I can't test that, but my two old Android phones were
also working fine with the meta viewport hack (I can't believe this
is still the "modern" way to do things after 15 years. Wtf). Best
experience is of course with a bigger display. On smaller screen
sizes, the game will use a camera to zoom around the game world and
follow the player's spaceship. Minimum window width is 1280 pixels
for no camera, and I think 800 pixels to be playable (otherwise the
avatar gets in the way too much in the boss fights). Oh, there's
also a secret boss fight that you can unlock when you toy around
with the Dev Tools :) What's left to do on the avatar animation
side: - I have to backport CMUdict to JavaScript / ECMAScript.
That's what I'm working on right now, as I'm not yet satisfied with
the timings of the phonemes. Existing tools and pipelines that do
this in python aren't realtime, which leads to my next point. - I
want to switch to using the "waveform energy detection" and a zero
cross rate detector to time phonemes more correctly. I believe that
changes in waveforms and their structures can detect differences in
phonemes, but it's a gut feeling and not a scientific fact.
Existing phoneme animation papers were kind of shit and broken (see
my making of article 2). The phoneme boundary detector is highly
experimental though and is gonna need a couple weeks more time
until it's finished. That's it for now, hope you gonna enjoy your
stay on my website and I hope you gonna have fun playing the Cookie
Consent Game :) Oh, also, because it might not be obvious: No LLMs
were used in the making of this website. Pretty much everything is
hand-coded, and unbundled and unminified on purpose so visitors can
learn from the code if they want to. ~Cookie
Author : cookiengineer
Score : 26 points
Date : 2025-12-30 18:08 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cookie.engineer)
(TXT) w3m dump (cookie.engineer)
| Terr_ wrote:
| Hot-take: "Oh, here's a link that says if I click it, someone
| will show off their artistic front-end design theme."
|
| "I see flat colors and a list of recent project news. Nothing at
| the bottom. Is it the wrong URL? Or does it not work on my phone?
| Let's go back and check the HN comments."
|
| "The submission has a bunch of text which doesn't seem to answer
| my immediate confusion. There's a game somewhere? Was that the
| wrong link? Did it not pop up correctly? Did I need to give the
| site special permissions?"
|
| TLDR: This random user unfamiliar with the site is not sure what
| they were supposed to focus-on and notice/appreciate, and wasn't
| able to figure it out within a reasonable period before needing
| to put the phone down again. (Not including the time to write
| this follow-up comment.)
| Contortion wrote:
| My browser auto-declines cookies so I also had the same
| thought. On reloading I can briefly see a pop-over with a lot
| of text in it before it disappears, so I guess that is the
| cookie game I initially missed.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Okay, so I think the problem here is that the "game" is easy to
| miss, when:
|
| 1. You have your audio off or volume too low.
|
| 2. You just don't interact with the bottom cookie prompt.
|
| 3. The prompt never shows up for some reason. Saw it a few
| times, but even after a lot of resetting cookies and reloading,
| I can't get it to show reliably.
|
| I suggest a special URL parameter so that you can link people
| to a slightly deeper step in the process where It's obvious
| what they should be interacting with.
| cookiengineer wrote:
| Could be that the avatar's speech is conflicting with an
| ongoing speech or sound track. Couldn't replicate it what you
| wrote yet, but gonna try to debug this a little more.
|
| I had to put the initial things in a click listener, and then
| it's 3 seconds after the initial click when the cookie
| consent banner is shown (due to AudioContext API limitations
| and that they have to be a user gesture event that .resume()s
| the audio context instance).
|
| > I suggest a special URL parameter so that you can link
| people to a slightly deeper step in the process where It's
| obvious what they should be interacting with.
|
| The Debugger Views here show more details, and you can play
| the game just fine and toy around with it:
|
| https://cookie.engineer/design/consent/index.html
| joduplessis wrote:
| Lol, amazing! Love the voice.
| neogodless wrote:
| Ha, I like the site, and enjoyed playing some of the game!
|
| So when I saw the "About Me" image, I thought Gen AI -
| https://cookie.engineer/about/me/teaser.jpg But no LLM used for
| that? (No judgment, just after seeing that image, and then you
| declaring no LLM use, I thought I'd ask!)
| cookiengineer wrote:
| > But no LLM used for that?
|
| Well, I mean, I self-hosted stable diffusion to be able to
| generate the teaser images and the award images (for the ranks
| in the Game Over Dialog).
|
| I only implemented the initial SD paper [1] back then so I have
| no clue whether the u-net architecture changed when it comes to
| the semantic mapping of the text/labels. Did that change and is
| Stable Diffusion 3 now an LLM, actually?
|
| [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.10752
| mmmlinux wrote:
| This feels like moving the goal posts.
| neogodless wrote:
| Sorry, you know this stuff way better than me. I thought "gen
| AI" that generated visualizations / images used similar code,
| but as I say Large LANGUAGE Models in my head, I realize it
| must be something else (at least in name!)
|
| Again this should in no way implicate a diminishing of the
| work and accomplishment of building your site. Just noticing
| some kind of "AI" (ANI) was used to make an image. Maybe
| worth clarifying for pedants like me (but probably _not_
| worth it ;-)!)
| nailer wrote:
| The site uses cookies, so needs a cookie warning. (monocle emoji)
| cookiengineer wrote:
| Exactly, that's what the game is about!
| nailer wrote:
| Oh there is one, it just appears after a delay.
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(page generated 2025-12-30 23:00 UTC)