Re:Play PacMan at google.com Now.
by grhino on Friday May 21, 2010 @04:54PM
(#1368819)
CoolPreviews, an addon for Firefox, caused the PacMan music to play even when the user wasn't viewing google.com. They've released an update that fixes the issue.
Re:Play PacMan at google.com Now.
by jacquesm on Friday May 21, 2010 @07:08PM
(#1369263)
Bad move by google, really. Start on a button click is one thing but auto-starting something that makes a bunch of noise on a page that has always been totally silent is really dumb.
Re:Play PacMan at google.com Now.
by studer on Friday May 21, 2010 @11:22PM
(#1369703)
Google doesn't autostart anything, it's a FireFox extension (Cool Previews) that loads the page in the background that causes the trouble. I suggest reading up on the real story before you start labeling things as "bad moves" and "really dumb".
Re:Play PacMan at google.com Now.
by studer on Friday May 21, 2010 @11:26PM
(#1369708)
You wouldn't be prepared to write 3,162 lines of code for something with a guaranteed audience of hundreds of millions of people? What does it take for you to get out of bed? Billions of viewers?
Re:Play PacMan at google.com Now.
by mawhidby on Friday May 21, 2010 @03:34PM
(#1368487)
On an unrelated note, as of 3:33PM EST, this story has 262 points over 4 hours, and is ranked lower than "Facebook caught sharing secret data with advertisers", which has 210 points over 16 hours (this story ranked 27, the facebook story 23). Is there a reason for this? Shouldn't this be near the top of HN?
Now, when I go to the address bar and type a query whose first Google result I am confident will be the destination I want, I've got a great way to get there.
Example:
"gg imdb Forest Gump"
Will get me to IMDB's Forest Gump page. So you can pretty much imagine the power here, especially for reference sites. Type the site name and the query, and you'll end up where you want to be.
Re:Play PacMan at google.com Now.
by josefresco on Friday May 21, 2010 @11:33AM
(#1367640)
Google is replacing the need for the "I'm feeling lucky" button with their auto-complete system. It's the same effect as the button but is shown in the auto-complete field while the user is typing.
This has the same side effect for Google regarding ads as does the button. Although if a user wants to be taken directly to website ABC they prob aren't a good audience for ads.
Re:Play PacMan at google.com Now.
by soundlab on Friday May 21, 2010 @12:13PM
(#1367778)
This is great, except for that some element of Google (address bar search?) is running in the background of my firefox browser and the siren audio is on a continuous loop even after leaving Google. No add-on or plug-in I remove helps.
Re:Play PacMan at google.com Now.
by bd on Friday May 21, 2010 @01:35PM
(#1368055)
Unfortunately Flash is currently pretty much unavoidable if you want sound effects in JS games.
I experimented with <audio> tag in HTML5 game few days ago: it's fine for media player type applications (where you play longer sounds with looser coupling to user actions), but it's not there yet for games (implementation-wise, API is ok).
If you need to play a lot of tiny sounds in rapid response to player actions, you are going to get random weird behaviors and cross-browser inconsistencies: noticeable lags, cracking noises, cuts and repetitions.
Re:Play PacMan at google.com Now.
by phoboslab on Friday May 21, 2010 @02:32PM
(#1368297)
This seems to be heavily depended on the file types you use. I have some experiments with many different, short, sound files running with <audio> just fine - in Chrome, FF and Opera at least.
Ogg Vorbis and (of course WAV) works quite nice, MP3 doesn't. For Safari, maybe AAC would be the right choice. Still, as you said, the <audio> implementation is quite buggy at times. But I have no doubt it will get better!
Re:Play PacMan at google.com Now.
by bd on Friday May 21, 2010 @03:32PM
(#1368483)
Yes, a good point. I confirm, also in my experience problems are very dependent on particular sound files. Some work perfectly fine, some make troubles.
And it's not just encoding, it seems to be dependent also on what's inside the sound file like a particular waveform or length.
For me the worst were a sequences of very short sounds (fractions of second) played in a direct response to rapid successive keypresses (keydown-keydown-keydown should make pew-pew-pew). No matter what I did, there was always at least one browser with some showstopping bug.
Re:Play PacMan at google.com Now.
by oilfieldtrash on Saturday May 22, 2010 @04:43PM
(#1371021)
What's the matter with you guys? THe PacMan thing was great. What a fun surprise. I've been to Google now 10 times in the past two days-- and I usually only use their serach engine once or twice a day. Stopped me from going to dogpile......
Re:Play PacMan at google.com Now.
by neovive on Friday May 21, 2010 @01:56PM
(#1368139)
Someone needs to publish a revised PacMan strategy guide for getting around all those extra obstacles. Should you get pellot inside the G at the start or end?
It's working!
https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/forum/1/678373
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2207/
Welcome to HN by the way.
http://pastebin.com/enyeHeKg
http://imgur.com/fNjWJ.png
EDIT: You wouldn't happen to be Rodger from the nonlogic community, would you?
How's it shakin'?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1367899
Edit: actually it seems this post one is older. Hadn't seen it :(
That's what they get from not using Canvas or any other technology newer than 10 years old. The game is built of 8x8 pixel DIVs.
For example, in Chrome, add this as one of the Search Engines in the options dialog: http://www.google.com/search?q=%s&btnI=Im+Feeling+Lucky
I've associated that with the keyword "gg"
Now, when I go to the address bar and type a query whose first Google result I am confident will be the destination I want, I've got a great way to get there.
Example:
"gg imdb Forest Gump"
Will get me to IMDB's Forest Gump page. So you can pretty much imagine the power here, especially for reference sites. Type the site name and the query, and you'll end up where you want to be.
Most of those sites has an opensearch provider.
This has the same side effect for Google regarding ads as does the button. Although if a user wants to be taken directly to website ABC they prob aren't a good audience for ads.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&site=&q=do+you+fe...
http://mrgan.tumblr.com/post/257187093/pie-guy
http://mrgan.com/pieguy/ <-- go here on your iphone
EDIT: I didn't see that you had to click "Insert Coin" to start.
I experimented with <audio> tag in HTML5 game few days ago: it's fine for media player type applications (where you play longer sounds with looser coupling to user actions), but it's not there yet for games (implementation-wise, API is ok).
If you need to play a lot of tiny sounds in rapid response to player actions, you are going to get random weird behaviors and cross-browser inconsistencies: noticeable lags, cracking noises, cuts and repetitions.
Ogg Vorbis and (of course WAV) works quite nice, MP3 doesn't. For Safari, maybe AAC would be the right choice. Still, as you said, the <audio> implementation is quite buggy at times. But I have no doubt it will get better!
And it's not just encoding, it seems to be dependent also on what's inside the sound file like a particular waveform or length.
For me the worst were a sequences of very short sounds (fractions of second) played in a direct response to rapid successive keypresses (keydown-keydown-keydown should make pew-pew-pew). No matter what I did, there was always at least one browser with some showstopping bug.
javascript:(function(){var rancidbacon={};try{rancidbacon.com=document.getElementsByName("pm-sound")[0];rancidbacon.com.parentElement.removeChild(rancidbacon.com);}catch(_){}})()
More details here: http://stuff.rancidbacon.com/google-pacman/
how senior did the approval have to be to get this allowed, do you think?
http://www.google.com/logos/index.html
http://operandx.com/GooglePacman/Play.html
Enjoy!
(no, not really)
Awesome :)
I liked the plain old google page .. simple
My score.