<story><title>Tearable Cloth Simulation in JavaScript</title><url>http://codepen.io/stuffit/pen/KrAwx</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>MrScruff</author><text>Without wishing to appear negative, I do find it odd the way that a technical crowd react to these online demos. Would you have found this impressive if it was a compiled executable? Because this is just the same thing, just running slower because it&apos;s on the web. It&apos;s not technically novel in any way.&lt;p&gt;If you&apos;re curious about the algorithm, then take a look at the presentation &apos;Advanced Character Physics&apos; by Jacobson. They were used in published games at least 13 years ago and are very widely known and implemented.&lt;p&gt;I get that there&apos;s some novelty to this stuff, but we already know that asm.js can achieve performance within a factor of 2 of compiled C code. Since we know that exists, I don&apos;t really see what&apos;s interesting about seeing each individual piece of code ported to work on the web.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tripzilch</author><text>Imagine if HN and comp.sys.ibm.pc.demos really would have the same audience. So everybody&apos;d be like&lt;p&gt;&quot;oh, cloth simulation. we did that in the 90s&quot;,&lt;p&gt;as well as,&lt;p&gt;&quot;... in javascript, even! ... just like scenerdude303 did 8 years ago, except he didn&apos;t have a canvas-element back then, web browsers were still make of wood and he had to get up at 5am to write the code in the snow when it was still fresh, type with his bare feet and be crawling uphill both ways, ah, why when I was a young programmer ...&quot;, etc.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Except&lt;/i&gt; that many people would also be supportive. Cool cloth demo, it works well! Nice touch with the interactivity and the right-mouse cutting action. Because those two make it fun to play with, and slightly more interesting than just the simulation by itself.&lt;p&gt;Because, and this is something that the actual HN audience should (optimally) also understand, writing a small demo like this is an act of creativity. That should be stimulated no matter what, because--actually I just remembered from some other discussions[0], there&apos;s really a load of people here that &lt;i&gt;don&apos;t&lt;/i&gt; understand this: When making art, there is tremendous value in doing what has been done before. It&apos;s called practice, and the value is having the experience of having &lt;i&gt;done&lt;/i&gt; something yourself. It&apos;s also rumoured to make perfect. It only gets you so far to just &lt;i&gt;know&lt;/i&gt; the &quot;why?&quot; and the &quot;how?&quot;. To get anywhere you also need to make something. Because &lt;i&gt;only&lt;/i&gt; from the vantage-point of being right in the middle of that mess, you can truly decide what your personal take on it, your influence will be. And if you can&apos;t, just go right back to practice :)&lt;p&gt;[0] it was a series of InkScape tutorials called &quot;vector game art for programmers&quot; or something. many people were complaining &quot;but he&apos;s only showing how to make &lt;i&gt;these&lt;/i&gt; characters and objects&quot;, that the author didn&apos;t explain &lt;i&gt;why&lt;/i&gt; the circles go where they should and what a proper shadow should look like. only by people that didn&apos;t actually &lt;i&gt;do&lt;/i&gt; the exercises, of course. there&apos;s no magic involved. just practice. if character faces are too complex, go draw fruits. all fruits. and then remake the rest of pac-man&apos;s sprites in vector! (in the snow, uphill both ways, etc)</text></comment>
<story><title>Tearable Cloth Simulation in JavaScript</title><url>http://codepen.io/stuffit/pen/KrAwx</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>MrScruff</author><text>Without wishing to appear negative, I do find it odd the way that a technical crowd react to these online demos. Would you have found this impressive if it was a compiled executable? Because this is just the same thing, just running slower because it&apos;s on the web. It&apos;s not technically novel in any way.&lt;p&gt;If you&apos;re curious about the algorithm, then take a look at the presentation &apos;Advanced Character Physics&apos; by Jacobson. They were used in published games at least 13 years ago and are very widely known and implemented.&lt;p&gt;I get that there&apos;s some novelty to this stuff, but we already know that asm.js can achieve performance within a factor of 2 of compiled C code. Since we know that exists, I don&apos;t really see what&apos;s interesting about seeing each individual piece of code ported to work on the web.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rrreese</author><text>This and your other comment make me really sad. For everything that is posted here on Hacker News, there will be many people who are familiar with it, who have domain knowledge. In a child comment  you refer to this as &quot;a game physics &apos;Hello World&apos;.&quot;&lt;p&gt;People who aren&apos;t familiar with this sort of thing find it really cool, hence the impressive number of upvotes. These online demos are accessible in the way some exe just isn&apos;t.&lt;p&gt;So condescending, dismissive, and of course the top voted comment :/</text></comment>