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BallDroppings

February 12, 2009
Author:

Josh Nimoy

http://www.jtnimoy.net/
Rate Experiment (1009 ratings):
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From the Author:

BallDroppings has already been implemented in other languages, you can download it for Mac or Windows here: http://www.balldroppings.com .. it's a musical playtoy that looks like abstract pong. My hope is that i will be able to port enough of it to Javascript, and then use a bit of Flash to manage the sound. The result will be a limited version of BallDroppings that works in the browser. I might also provide instructions on how to begin interacting.

Technology:

Javascript / processing.js

Comments

By spiedi free on August 31, 2010

I made rihanna's name

Reply to this comment
By millermcgraw on August 12, 2010

Very nice experiment! Just to let you know don't let the balls get to high of a pitch, if it gets to high the whole thing crashes.

Reply to this comment
By Timothy on July 14, 2010

Awesome! Ironically, it doesn't work in Chrome for me...

Reply to this comment
By EricS on August 05, 2010

Every

Time i try to go to the site it redirects me to some bullshit site any one else get the prob

(it used to work for me

Reply to this comment
By Hatch on July 08, 2010

As soon as a ball hits a line, it crashes in my chrome browser!

Reply to this comment
By Matt on June 21, 2010

The physics seems broken on the Windows version - lines sometimes have to be drawn with the opposite angle in order to bounce the ball in the correct direction.

Reply to this comment
By Bob on June 23, 2010

It doesn't matter what OS you have and it is working fine. The balls (hahaha) angled correctly and having enough momentum (hahahahaha) to bounce (ha) off the lines and fly over them instead of back.

Reply to this comment
By Matt on July 16, 2010

Perhaps for you it is working fine. For me the lines randomly work incorrectly. If a ball is in a parabollic arc from left to right and strikes a line with 0 degree incline upon its descent it should continue in another parabollic arc from left to right. Instead they can somtimes bounce backwards. That, to me, does not mean 'it is working fine.'

Reply to this comment
By Trevor on July 26, 2010

Then perhaps it's not a perfect 0 degree incline but one that is slightly off, perhaps not even by one degree.

Reply to this comment
By NorthenerOfTheSouth on August 09, 2010

Proof you are wrong: http://www.youtu.be/RAOHkeJT914

Reply to this comment
By NorthenerOfTheSouth on August 09, 2010

URL shortening didn't work, here's your proof: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAOHkeJT914

Reply to this comment
By Tudd on July 27, 2010

It's still not supposed to bounce like that.

Reply to this comment
By NorthenerOfTheSouth on July 27, 2010

True, I don't think that should happen either.

Reply to this comment
By crazyal02 on August 31, 2010

Really? I disagree.

Reply to this comment
By crazyal02 on August 31, 2010

Wait, on second thought, forget that. We could argue about this to no end.

Reply to this comment
By Adam Crabtree on June 11, 2010

You know you're a HUGE FREAKING GEEK when the first thing you do with this thing is create a Black Body Emitter Simulator... =)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izf85PDNJLw

I rule!

Reply to this comment
By soundseller BLOG on May 29, 2010

Cool stuff - very creative and addictive :)

Reply to this comment
By tesujigames on April 08, 2010

BallDroppings is now available for Android mobile phones. It is an official port, authorized by Josh Nimoy.

See a demonstration video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbtpRzsljsE

For more information visit http://tesujigames.com/p/balldroppings.html

Reply to this comment
By boogstersu2` on July 01, 2010

i hope there will be an iPhone version, too!

Reply to this comment
By Tudd on August 16, 2010

Just use Sounddrop. The free version looks exactly like this! The two dollar one has more instruments and a few more things like that.

Ps I wrote this from my iPod touch. :)

Reply to this comment
By Jcee on March 07, 2010

saveing and loading a configuration would be epic

in addition add the input boxes for gravity, and ball speed

and allow for a 'drop ball' button, rather than paternal

btw it crashes sometimes, i think its when a ball bounces to high

Reply to this comment
By Bob on March 04, 2010

Make it so you can load adn make level codes

Reply to this comment
By adam cook on February 24, 2010

it is so fun i have 2 hr of home work but i still do it any time i get a chance i made one that goes on forefer this is sweet!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Reply to this comment
By jn on February 03, 2010

Two suggestions: (1) as mentioned before, the ability to delete lines without a reset. and (2) the acoustics are backwards: longer lines should have longer wavelengths (lower frequencies) and thus a lower pitch. A physics based game should obey all the rules of physics. Otherwise, great distraction!

Reply to this comment
By bailinbone15 on April 04, 2010

I'm pretty re the pitch is based on the speed of the ball, not on the line.

Reply to this comment
By Selddir on January 27, 2010

This is insanely cool.

Reply to this comment
By misterperdun on February 01, 2010

Hello? am from Russia and my enlish very bad.

Just tell me, what a f... this f...ng ball dont work??

Reply to this comment
By Timothy on July 14, 2010

That would actually be very funny, if the person speaking was fluent in English. But I do admire your trollism.

Reply to this comment
By Timothy on July 14, 2010

That was meant to reply to the person below me. I accidentally clicked the wrong button. Sorry.

Reply to this comment
By Jesus on February 02, 2010

Try it in a browser that doesn't have a sexual attraction to males.

Reply to this comment
By g$ on December 15, 2009

I am totally obsessed - why did I have to discover this right at this moment? I'm trying to graduate from college dammit

Reply to this comment
By Anthony on December 19, 2009

You are totally right I love this.

Reply to this comment
By Mountain/\Ash on December 09, 2009

not working too well on 4.0.249.30 (Public 1st release mac version) as it has a minimum window height and width.

Reply to this comment
By JH on December 01, 2009

if u set the drop rate and gravity to max, it crashes the game.....

Reply to this comment
By santiago on November 24, 2009

this is fantastic, great stuff.

Reply to this comment
By Amit on November 21, 2009

this is so cool..I am addicted lol

Reply to this comment
By Chris_Chrome on November 20, 2009

Never felt so productive in my life.

Reply to this comment
By Admin on August 04, 2010

Please stop posting negative comments.

Reply to this comment
By FireFox on October 26, 2009

This is great! I have been playing this for one year, and I still ♥ it!

Reply to this comment
By KELLY HUANG on October 03, 2009

i love this!

It;s soooo cool

Reply to this comment
By motiur on September 28, 2009

It would be much cooler if the balls had random colors on bouncing ,nonetheless still pretty cool.

Reply to this comment
By Admin on August 04, 2010

Please provide your email in further posts

Thanks -Admin

Reply to this comment
By ace1500 on September 26, 2009

I just discovered a glitch. If you add too many gravity,game will freeze and stop responding to any actions,even resetting!!!

Reply to this comment
By motiur on September 28, 2009

This is so true , try something else ,increase the drop rate and see what happens.

Reply to this comment
By pessemist on October 18, 2009

negitve gravity too

Reply to this comment
By i. wong on September 26, 2009

So so so addictive

Reply to this comment
By John J on September 22, 2009

Can't get it to run.

Reply to this comment
By Jacob on September 16, 2009

I just made a pentatonic scale with one line.

Reply to this comment
By Jcee on August 29, 2009

it would be nice if you could choose the tone of each line, and delete lines but its still great

Reply to this comment
By Nafri on August 27, 2009

this is cool ................

Reply to this comment
By punkthink on August 16, 2009

Wow! Now that is cool. Anyone try making gravity lighter rather than heavier? It's more complex to make intricate mazes with lighter gravity but possible with persistence. By lighter i mean hit it the button 'til yer balls start "falling" up rather than down.

I too would also like to see some kind of a record feature built in if possible... though I imagine you could just use an external prog to record it yourself. After you get a number of different recordings you could stitch 'em together and make whole songs from it, which would be fun in its own right.

All in all, lots of interesting possibilities.

Reply to this comment
By randomness in a nutshell on October 22, 2009

just get hypercam, you can record anything, get v3, records sound

Reply to this comment
By Kajaah117 on August 14, 2009

Anybody else spend an hour trying to recreate Close Encounters? =P

Reply to this comment
By Adam Crabtree on June 11, 2010

No, but how 'bout a Black Body Emitter, =)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izf85PDNJLw

Reply to this comment
By Trevor on August 12, 2009

Wow. This is certainly mesmerizing to say the least...

Reply to this comment
By Ryan on July 27, 2009

Wonderful experiment. Very creative and highly addictive!

Reply to this comment
By charlie on July 24, 2009

are you related to leonard nimoy? (spock, from star trek)

Reply to this comment
By Josh Nimoy on October 18, 2009

Yes, I am, and thanks for noticing

Reply to this comment
By randomness in a nutshell on October 22, 2009

do you look like a vulcan??

Reply to this comment
By Caers Mane on July 15, 2009

Fantastic! Addictive and brilliant fun, and works perfectly in Safari and Camino :D

Reply to this comment
By David O'Donnell on July 15, 2009

FWIW, it works perfectly well in Safari, too :-)

Reply to this comment
By b_Love on June 28, 2009

Holy cow! Amazing stuff. I played with this thing for an hour before I knew it. Tried it on IE, and it bombed of course. Gotta love Chrome...gotta love Google. You guys rock! If you made soap, I would bath in Google.

Reply to this comment
By r3uven on June 20, 2009

Nice ... untill my processor crashed ... jk .

Very cool app .. but it frooze when i had full gravity with 2 balls in an infinite move.

Reply to this comment
By JustJosephh on July 11, 2009

Yeah, same here, i was on it for like 5 minutes and then decided to play with full gravity and full drop rate then it just stoped.

But i had to play it again just to hear the cute sounds the balls made

Reply to this comment
By google chrome lover on September 07, 2009

That happened to me I was like WHAT THE BUMMER

Reply to this comment
By Arda Cole on June 19, 2009

Amazingly simple, yet so fun!

Heh, I ended up crashing the app by making a ball continuously accelerate off the screen and back on the screen though.

Reply to this comment
By Arthur Migdal on June 18, 2009

On Google Chrome for Mac the ball hits the stick i drew and freezes.

Reply to this comment
By converse75 on June 08, 2009

Very clever sound and equally creative. Wonderful invention.

Reply to this comment
By Jacques on June 04, 2009

I recommend letting it run for a few minutes without altering anything once you make a decent "maze" if you want to here more of a musical quality, to let the rate and everything equal out.

Reply to this comment
By Alexter101 on May 31, 2009

COOLIO!

Reply to this comment
By Jacques on June 04, 2009

I recommend letting it run for a few minutes without altering anything once you make a decent "maze" if you want to here more of a musical quality, to let the rate and everything equal out.

Reply to this comment
By google chrome lover on September 07, 2009

stop spamming

Reply to this comment
By Ahmed on May 27, 2009

Actually i See No Difference Between Running It on latest FIREFOX and LATEST Google CHROME really both the same Opera Sucks.. So Does AVANT ... IE Not Smooth

Reply to this comment
By C on May 24, 2009

Cool. Nice concept. I think the pitch is determined by the speed at which the ball hits the lines. Also, at high gravity (or maybe high pitch/speed), it freezes for me.

Reply to this comment
By Anonymous on June 01, 2009

The reason it freezes at high gravity is because the high gravity produces high speeds. The javascript plays sounds from an array of sounds that are increasing in pitch. If a ball hits too fast, the sound that the javascript trys to play is not in the array of sounds, so the javascript crashs. However, there is no visible indication of failure, so the experiment seems frozen.

Reply to this comment
By Ahmed on May 27, 2009

it depends On Both speed and gravity and also the part the ball contacts the stick (middle/ends) I'm Enjoying it and showing some musical things with my friends :)

Reply to this comment
By Tim Brooks on May 22, 2009

Hooray for the harmonic series!

Reply to this comment
By Joshua on May 16, 2009

my name is Josh too!

Reply to this comment
By Bmbirdsong on May 16, 2009

WOW! What a wonderful concept! SO VERY COOL!!!

Reply to this comment
By nathan on April 22, 2009

Crashes everytime right before the ball hits the line.

Fresh install of Google Chrome.

Reply to this comment
By Fuck o Matic on April 25, 2009

U are a fucking bitch because u stink so shit out your bum and piss off!

Reply to this comment
By ... on December 24, 2009

nice.

Reply to this comment
By Zach on June 24, 2009

Is'nt there a moderator here

Also people who post random crap are utterly stupid. May the sand fleas of a thousand camels infest your armpits.

Reply to this comment
By Jon E on April 23, 2009

Are you using this version

type about:version in the address bar to check.

Google Chrome 1.0.154.55 (Official Build 12734)

WebKit 525.19

V8 0.3.9.4

User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/1.0.154.55 Safari/525.19

Reply to this comment
By Jon E on April 16, 2009

I love this thing, I am hoping that he can make a portable version or to enhance it a little. There is so much potential, such as allowing color or importing images. I would like to see that ability, so that when you import an image, it will use the outline and make a path for the ball. One thing I am sure everyone has tried is opening multiple browser windows and timing the sounds. I hope this influences future decisions to add features. Keep up the good work.

Reply to this comment
By Jon E on April 17, 2009

I am going to add some pictures of really good diagrams that make nice sounds.

I will give you the link later.

Reply to this comment
By Brad F on April 11, 2009

Stop using Flash. Seriously.

Reply to this comment
By Niavlys on May 09, 2009

Great idea. What do you propose?

Reply to this comment
By Yukulele on July 29, 2009

You can use the balise

but that can't transpose

Reply to this comment
By Yukulele on July 29, 2009

you can ues the "sound" balise

Reply to this comment
By uber on April 01, 2009

The best I've seen!

Reply to this comment
By Francisco_Br on April 01, 2009

this experience is cool =D

Reply to this comment
By John on March 30, 2009

p.s.

when launching in google chrome, it's even more laggy. for me at least. mozilla seems to work the best. god, i love this thing.

Reply to this comment
By culdin on April 02, 2009

OMGOSH I AM ADDICTED TO THIS!!! PERCUSSIANISTS AROUND THE WORLD!! REJOICE!!

Reply to this comment
By John on March 30, 2009

i am enamored with this. this is like a twisted version of fruity loops (with one instrument) that is so inventive, it's highly addictive. also, I do have to agree with a few posts up top.

1. downloadable (if only to speed up and/or fix glitching).

2. able to remove lines.

3. able to do circular lines.

4. love you guys, keep up the good work!!!

Reply to this comment
By KEVIN on March 26, 2009

I finally figured out that the angle that the ball hits the line determines the sound! VERY COOL

Maybee add color?? I dont know, be cool if you could submit it but i dont know how you would do that

HINT: I AM NOT (WITH EMPHASIS) NOT A DEVELOPER AND I DONT KNOW HOW TO USE JAVA. (PERIOD)

OVERALL SCORE: 9 . 9 / 1 0

sometimes the thing freezes but i think thats just b/c my computer (and internet) is slow =^0

*sigh* computers are rigged to break

Reply to this comment
By Leandro on March 24, 2009

Impressive.

Reply to this comment
By Christopher Bowns on March 24, 2009

The script stops on Webkit nightlies when it tries to play a sound. (this is on OS X 10.5.6)

Reply to this comment
By Leandro on March 23, 2009

This looks great. So simple and so fun. I didn't know the canvas HTML tag. The code seems so simple. Congratulations!

Reply to this comment
By kay on March 23, 2009

...does not work in Opera 10: hangs as soon as ball is about to hit a line

Reply to this comment
By Hazzard on March 23, 2009

Эм.. Багнутая фигня ... но красиво ...

Reply to this comment
By Rob on March 23, 2009

How about a little Colour? Coordinate with the sound of course!

Reply to this comment
By Mitch on March 22, 2009

Edit: I will however say, your method of collision detection is genius :P

Far more elegant than my Cartesian method.

Reply to this comment
By Mitch on March 22, 2009

OMG I am halfway through creating a JavaScript clone of balldroppings inspired by your Windows version. No joke. I can't believe I found this.

I'm sorry to say though Josh, mine runs MUCH faster. =P

Reply to this comment
By Noam on March 21, 2009

Very cool...

Double-click on a line to remove it would be nice...

And a "Share your masterpiece with a friend" button.

Reply to this comment
By Katie on March 21, 2009

Outstanding!!

Reply to this comment
By Aaron on March 21, 2009

I love this, I'd quite like to see a save button and who knows add extra features coloured lines that make different sounds or notes.

Reply to this comment
By Mike Reckmeyer on March 20, 2009

fun to make music :)

Reply to this comment
By Joseph on March 20, 2009

I think my balls just dropped watching this.

Reply to this comment
By Todd on March 21, 2009

I think I know you.

Reply to this comment
By scott on March 19, 2009

Gravity off lol

Reply to this comment
By ciber on March 19, 2009

Great! The best i've seen, but it might be improved with the ability to draw circular lines

Reply to this comment
By Zach on June 24, 2009

Im pretty sure he ment circles.

Reply to this comment
By Zach on June 04, 2009

No such thing as circular lines LOL

Reply to this comment
By Ben on March 19, 2009

Clearly one of the best Experiments! Now someone needs to make a Mixer!

Reply to this comment
By mishal on March 19, 2009

not dropping once i draw a line :(

Reply to this comment
By Californian on March 19, 2009

It's cool to make a few boxes with balls in them on high gravity!

Reply to this comment
By Alby Barber on March 18, 2009

Amazing how is it done?????

Reply to this comment
By Auron on March 18, 2009

Genious.

Reply to this comment
By mw on March 18, 2009

If you hold the line 'til the ball drops on it, you can see how it rebounds and adjust the direction. The line is only set when you let go. Cool.

Reply to this comment
By folktrash on March 18, 2009

excellent! add mute?

Reply to this comment
By erwin on January 03, 2010

turn you volume off?

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