You start in the Halo 3 main menu, go through the lobby, spawn in the map, and explore. There are photos, stories, quests, mini-games, and Easter eggs scattered around. Movement is via WASD and mouse, no signup.

Guardian was my third place growing up. Starting in 9th grade, my friends and I would get home after school, get on Halo, and hang out in a Guardian free-for-all with MLG settings until everyone came online, then play customs or ranked for hours.

On weekends we'd bring our Xboxes and monitors to each other's houses, stay up all night, and play in local tournaments. Guardian was probably the closest thing I had to a digital home, so I wanted my site to live there. Playing it and hearing the theme music for the first time in 10+ years in a place I knew by heart felt a bit like coming home.

The map itself isn't AI-generated. It uses an original Guardian asset export distributed through the fan-run Halo Archive: an OBJ with 115,250 faces, the original UV coordinates, and 42 referenced diffuse textures, loaded through Three.js.

What was AI-generated was everything on top needed to turn it into a complete game: shaders, lighting, scenario tags, physics, animations, collision, movement, sky and fog, lifts, pickups, weapon handling, and quest routing.

Every pickup was placed by hand against the geometry using callout maps and a dev-only coordinate locator. This was surprisingly tedious to get right - I think it took me 10 iterations just to get the blue lift on Camo to line up parallel with the ledge.

The Guardian geometry and texture assets are 21 MB, so the load is hidden inside the lobby countdown and scorecard screen while the shaders warm up. It targets 60 FPS and feels smooth on a recent MacBook in Chrome.

Touch controls work on mobile, but the field of view is roughly 20 degrees in portrait, so desktop is definitely the best way to play it.

I built it with Codex using Astra. It wrote essentially all of the code: 20,552 lines of TypeScript across 118 files, 973M tokens, 37 hours of runtime, and about 25-30 hours of my time.

Coding wasn't the hard part. The time-consuming part was deciding which memories belonged in the map, where each should live, what game mechanic fit each one best, and then playing it over and over to fix bugs and get the movement and user flow to feel right.

I'll write up more about the Codex/Astra side in a comment since I had a lot of interesting learnings from building something this large with it.

This is an unofficial fan project and I'm not making money from it. The geometry, textures, UI, and many of the sound effects are Halo material and belong to their respective owners.

Some things are still rough. There's occasional lag when picking up a power weapon. The lifts don't feel quite natural - it was hard to replicate the vacuum effect of the real lifts. On some browsers like Firefox, audio needs a click before it starts.

Would love feedback on how it could be improved, especially from anyone else who spent a lot of time on this map.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49732259

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49709695

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48897814

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I recently updated my website to have a touch of this new AI thing.

The initial idea was simple: what if visitors could explore a CV by chatting with it instead of scanning a traditional static website?

I'm quite happy how the final version turned out:

* It runs LLM inference via Groq at 100-200ms latency at super low cost. The token generation is intentionally throttled to make the interaction feel natural, otherwise you'd literally hit enter and the response is already there.

* Except for a markdown rendering and HTMX4 there's no client side javascript!

* It's build with a custom server-side swift stack so everything related to the HTMX4 static site generation and networking layer is pure swift.

* As a nice side effect, search engines/crawlers cannot collect my CV right away, everything is bound to interactivity with the chat interface.

Technically you can ask the chat anything you want about my professional work experience. Rate limits & guard rails apply :)

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48816920

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48800153

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48787053

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48623790

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48507379

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48432597

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This is my personal site, but instead of the usual landing page it drops you into an interactive shell.

It's a React SPA with a virtual filesystem and command history. About 28 commands work the way you'd expect (ls, cd, cat, tree, find, grep, head, tail, wc, which, man, history, mkdir, touch, rm, cp, mv, echo, env, sudo, open, clear, pwd, whoami, date, uname, vi, vim). Tab completion, piping where it makes sense, and a help if you get stuck.

I keep adding commands when I'm bored, suggestions welcome.

Try help or just ls.

PS. Can you find the Easter-egg?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48286307

Points: 3

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48261575

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Do you maintain a colophon for your website? If so, please share it here. It will be nice to see how other people from the HN community set up their websites, what technologies they use and what choices they have made.

If you do not have a colophon page, please feel free to share the details directly in a comment.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48248141

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48024102

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