> The creation of Floor796 started in 2018. I spent the first year creating the animation editor, the rendering engine and the site itself. Then I started drawing the first characters. I drew slowly at first, as I had to get used to the projection and constantly improve the animation editor. I've been creating the first block for over 8 months. Now I draw 1 block in about 1-1.5 months.
Author made everything, including the editor, by himself.
The source map is there. The whole thing is made with JavaScript and with very little (pretty much no?) dependencies. No React, No TypeScript, No 54.643 packages to download. He seems to use lesscss but that's about it.
Sometimes I wonder if we lost the art-craft in all of this frameworks mania. This work has better performance than 99.9% of the apps out there despite being reasonably complex (UI-wise). I legit though this was built with WebAssembly at the initial interactions.
I learned of this site via HN a few years back and someone mentioned that the author must be Russian and mentioned the characters from Kin Dza Dza. A quick search revealed the film is freely available on Youtube with English subtitles. It's a great film and thankful for floor796 in revealing it as well as being an amazing work of art.
Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but it would be more correct to say that the author/artist is likely from a country that uses the Cyrillic script.
This has been making the rounds for the years and I think what captivates me the most is the art style. There is something about it I cannot put my finger on. Just like the art style of Moebius or the 90's game Flashback.
I thought for sure this was eBoy at first. The style is similar and eBoy has been around forever but looks like it’s just someone else who is really good at this stuff.
For some time recently, I was zooming in on Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights. The floor's level of interactivity would be so nice there. At least on this floor, I can guess what's going on quite reliably. The experience is quite similar at some level though. I saw Bosch's originals (or 1-to-1 by size repros) many years ago and without zooming in, it was incomprehensible. With zoom, the details are overwhelming.
Note this digitisation was by a company called Mad Pixel, and supported by Google in 2009. It was the first experiment that later became the Google Art Project in 2011 (now Google Arts & Culture).
The entire page was amazing, but holy shit that art in the middle that shows how the current system works where kids are sent to school to study and then they graduate, get crushed into becoming mere tools instead of the human beings we are meant to be.
Also there are a lot of special clickable actions (mentioned in the FAQ > About section, or just keep clicking until you find something, there are 20+ special actions).
Is it just me or is the phrase "human beings" used more often than simply "humans"? I've just started to notice this: the next word after "human" is very often "beings". Whenever someone wants to emphasize our humanity (as opposed, say, to a horse's horseness), they almost always say "human _beings_" instead of "humans". Somehow "human beings" seems to emphasize the "human spirit/soul".
And recently even dropping the negation itself while keeping the meaning: “je sais pas”
I never thought about that. Interesting. This negation related cycle is apparently called Jespersen’s cycle and happens in many languages. The English equivalent
From the FAQ in the "about" section of the website:
- You can try to find Wally (Waldo), as in the well-known game Where's Wally. He is partially visible, but if you click on him, he will appear in full and wave at you.
- Quest #1 - Mafia Treasures. To start the quest, go to the room where the Mafia is holding the annual meeting and click on the suitcase.
- Quest #2 - Subspace Tuner: To start this quest, click on the large advertising screen that says 'Bad Signal' next to the pirate ship.
- Payphone - you can call different subscribers on the 796th floor. Subscriber numbers are constantly being added and can be found in various places on the floor.
- In the Police Station click on the big screen to see the project statistics: current online, visits by country, number on interactions with all elements on the floor, etc.
- One of the arcade machines has a real game - Racer796.
- In the park zone there is Change My Mind guy. Click on him to add your own phrase to the rotation.
- You can compose a 10-second melody and add it to rotation by clicking on the guy in the hospital with the pink synthesizer.
- You can draw small pixel animation and add it to rotation by clicking on the Fun Drawing Screen near the Police Station.
- Click on the Chunk Norris in the park zone.
- Click on the JAWS 19 ad screen in the block with Back to the Future references.
- Click on Naruto near the pirate ship.
- There is Free Ads Board next to the pirate ship. You can draw your own advertising screen and specify which URL it links to.
- There are also many small interactive elements on the floor, clicking on which will show an additional picture, play a sound or cause some action to occur.
Thanks for sharing this one. There's so many brilliant and funny little vignettes in this piece. I'm amazed at what some people are able to do, so far outside anything I could dream about creating.
Would be interesting to give all the NPC AI, then control one and see how everything interacts, or get dropped into this in first person and interact with everything/everyone powered by AI.
Is Waldo really there? Because I've looked everywhere, and at this point I'm a bit concerned that my eyes are going to give out before I'm able to find him. That guy sure is a wily fella.
I managed to find him without help - I'm stubborn - but man, did it take me a long time to do it. It didn't help that I was constantly being distracted by some new character grabbing my attention. There's just so much here!
There is now a neon add for some weird place called 'Hacker News'; right between the ones for Dunder Mifflin and Weyland Yutani Corp, over by the Catbus, behind that new huge pirate ship, but if you hit the Black Mesa ad you've gone too far.
the guy must have started consuming media in the womb and has an amazing ability to capture iconic characters and moments with the smallest possible numbers of pixles, the proof of that is bieng able to identify many familiar characters, but the ones from different cultures register as extras and are devoid of personality, pattern recognition doing it's thing effortlessly.
It's very much of our time, and speaks to the need for drama and absurdity, and also the role that AI is bieng pushed to fill, while showing that for true iconic imagery , human biengs still have the edge.
Mega gif indeed. Two relevant excerpts found in the about page (it's a gif but not a gif):
> Why 796?
> The name of the project has a small code: 7, 9 and 6 are the ordinal numbers of the letters in the English alphabet for the word GIF. This project is essentially one big gif, a mega gif, so all the action takes place on the 796th (GIF) floor of the space station :)
> How does animation rendering work?
In order to maintain pixel clarity and still have good compression, it was necessary to create own video format. The entire animation is divided into sections, and each section is packed into this special format. The browser then loads the desired section and renders it in a separate thread into the common canvas.
Amazing, real dedication and it looks so good! Have spent some time just wandering around and clicking on different characters I don't recognize.
So fun
> You can try to find Wally (Waldo), as in the well-known game Where's Wally. He is partially visible, but if you click on him, he will appear in full and wave at you.
just win10 and firefox. It wanted to run workers in firefox, locked up firefox, then somehow taskmanager was locked up and things went downhill from there.
One of my soft milestone tests for AGI is if this gets reproduced in a World Model with Gaussian Splats or whatever it is by then that lets you do gameplay walkthrough in first player egocentric 3D-6DOF-360 view in XR with some friends till then its just all stochastic parrots on word calculators whats the point
The editor that is used to draw these animations https://floor796.com/editor/l0
Author has a YouTube channel too somewhere where you can see him making a drawing start to end. (edit: https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCribkEGzOuMQ9ozb0ektMCQ)
From FAQs
> The creation of Floor796 started in 2018. I spent the first year creating the animation editor, the rendering engine and the site itself. Then I started drawing the first characters. I drew slowly at first, as I had to get used to the projection and constantly improve the animation editor. I've been creating the first block for over 8 months. Now I draw 1 block in about 1-1.5 months.
Author made everything, including the editor, by himself.
The source map is there. The whole thing is made with JavaScript and with very little (pretty much no?) dependencies. No React, No TypeScript, No 54.643 packages to download. He seems to use lesscss but that's about it.
Sometimes I wonder if we lost the art-craft in all of this frameworks mania. This work has better performance than 99.9% of the apps out there despite being reasonably complex (UI-wise). I legit though this was built with WebAssembly at the initial interactions.
Different constraints produce different results.
Thats curious, there are multiple Russian and even Soviet-era characters which I don't think western people know about.
The two language options are English and Russian.
I learned of this site via HN a few years back and someone mentioned that the author must be Russian and mentioned the characters from Kin Dza Dza. A quick search revealed the film is freely available on Youtube with English subtitles. It's a great film and thankful for floor796 in revealing it as well as being an amazing work of art.
You can click characters to show who they are, as well.
Definitely too many to be random. I think they are all mostly soviet era things, no? So the author is likely an émigré from the USSR.
Why émigré? He is probably Russian.
Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but it would be more correct to say that the author/artist is likely from a country that uses the Cyrillic script.
>..the site’s developer Pavel Sannikau is always working on new rooms for floor796. Sannikau is a 36-year-old web programmer living in Belarus
From 2023 article https://www.cartoonbrew.com/tools-of-the-trade/floors796-pav...
The guy was active on Reddit a week ago https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/1pqktaj/new_block_56_...
Author is from Minsk, Belarus. This information is in his profile on Artstation
I just spotted Steven Segal is munching on a carrot.
This has been making the rounds for the years and I think what captivates me the most is the art style. There is something about it I cannot put my finger on. Just like the art style of Moebius or the 90's game Flashback.
To me it has very Habbo hotel like graphics, not the same but it hits the same "itch". Specifically with the dancing.
I thought for sure this was eBoy at first. The style is similar and eBoy has been around forever but looks like it’s just someone else who is really good at this stuff.
https://www.eboy.com/
Silicon Valley (TV show) had a similar themed intro style
Ouch, this now looks dated. Society is in another mood...
The art style reminds me a bit of that of Al Jaffee in MAD magazine.
Theme Hospital
That was my first thought too. I replayed it recently. Still a great game.
The style reminds me of the old Alien Syndrome arcade game
Looks more like Xcom: UFO Defense
For some time recently, I was zooming in on Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights. The floor's level of interactivity would be so nice there. At least on this floor, I can guess what's going on quite reliably. The experience is quite similar at some level though. I saw Bosch's originals (or 1-to-1 by size repros) many years ago and without zooming in, it was incomprehensible. With zoom, the details are overwhelming.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Garden_of_Earthly_Delights...
Note this digitisation was by a company called Mad Pixel, and supported by Google in 2009. It was the first experiment that later became the Google Art Project in 2011 (now Google Arts & Culture).
The entire page was amazing, but holy shit that art in the middle that shows how the current system works where kids are sent to school to study and then they graduate, get crushed into becoming mere tools instead of the human beings we are meant to be.
As someone else mentioned this is a reference to the Pink Floyd - Another Brick in the Wall, most likely this music video[0].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qs35t2xFqdU
https://floor796.com/#t4r2,799,120
I think it is “Pink Floyd - Another Brick in the Wall” reference.
edit: Ha! Actually one can double-click on objects and get more info about their origin.
Single-clicking is sufficient :)
Also there are a lot of special clickable actions (mentioned in the FAQ > About section, or just keep clicking until you find something, there are 20+ special actions).
Is it just me or is the phrase "human beings" used more often than simply "humans"? I've just started to notice this: the next word after "human" is very often "beings". Whenever someone wants to emphasize our humanity (as opposed, say, to a horse's horseness), they almost always say "human _beings_" instead of "humans". Somehow "human beings" seems to emphasize the "human spirit/soul".
Yes. There are lots around; whenever the original word becomes too short for the importance people want to give it.
Tuna fish, chai tea, Enter the room -> enter “into” the room, French: hui (today) -> aujourd’hui (day of today)
Keyword: pleonasm
I'm sure I've even heard French people say "au jour d'aujourd'hui"
I'm pretty sure I've seen that one in a list, by a French person, of things they wish other people wouldn't say!
Yes, we had an epidemic of that about 10 years ago. It was everywhere. Thankfully it's mostly gone now and we're back to "aujourd'hui".
Also French: je ne sais (I don’t know) → je ne sais pas (I don’t know a step)
And recently even dropping the negation itself while keeping the meaning: “je sais pas”
I never thought about that. Interesting. This negation related cycle is apparently called Jespersen’s cycle and happens in many languages. The English equivalent
I say not -> I “do” not say -> I don’t say. -> ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jespersen%27s_cycle
Lived experience
Thats fun. I like it. Try clicking on naruto :) https://floor796.com/#t2l4,780,732
Or on Chuck Norris: https://floor796.com/#t3l1,134,205
Or the black hole https://floor796.com/#t3r3,28,997
Or the Ninja Turtle to the left of the black hole.
Cute. There's that tripedal robot from Interstellar there.
So fun! Are there any other easter eggs like this? I've been clicking everywhere and didn't find any
From the FAQ in the "about" section of the website:
- You can try to find Wally (Waldo), as in the well-known game Where's Wally. He is partially visible, but if you click on him, he will appear in full and wave at you.
- Quest #1 - Mafia Treasures. To start the quest, go to the room where the Mafia is holding the annual meeting and click on the suitcase.
- Quest #2 - Subspace Tuner: To start this quest, click on the large advertising screen that says 'Bad Signal' next to the pirate ship.
- Payphone - you can call different subscribers on the 796th floor. Subscriber numbers are constantly being added and can be found in various places on the floor.
- In the Police Station click on the big screen to see the project statistics: current online, visits by country, number on interactions with all elements on the floor, etc.
- One of the arcade machines has a real game - Racer796.
- In the park zone there is Change My Mind guy. Click on him to add your own phrase to the rotation.
- You can compose a 10-second melody and add it to rotation by clicking on the guy in the hospital with the pink synthesizer.
- You can draw small pixel animation and add it to rotation by clicking on the Fun Drawing Screen near the Police Station.
- Click on the Chunk Norris in the park zone.
- Click on the JAWS 19 ad screen in the block with Back to the Future references.
- Click on Naruto near the pirate ship.
- There is Free Ads Board next to the pirate ship. You can draw your own advertising screen and specify which URL it links to.
- There are also many small interactive elements on the floor, clicking on which will show an additional picture, play a sound or cause some action to occur.
The Jaws one is fun too, only reason I found it is because it says click beneath it, https://floor796.com/#b3l3,84,789
Fight Club rules poster: https://floor796.com/#t3r3,776,193
This reminds me a lot of the 2000s internet that I grew up on. This was the kind of thing I used to find using StumbleUpon.
Hacker News shoutout: https://floor796.com/#t1l5,122,735
Prior discussions here on HN noted this writeup on how some of it works (in Russian):
https://habr.com/ru/companies/floor796/articles/673318/
Amazing work, but I didn't expect to see Wunschpunsch (https://floor796.com/#b2l2,302,256) or Kommisar Rex (https://floor796.com/#b3r1,163,852) there. Others mentioned Soviet-era characters, which makes me curious about the cultural background of the creator.
Not often you see Lexx references: https://floor796.com/#t0l2,597,381
Kai strikes again. That series was hilarious to my undergrad self. I think I caught it on Comedy Central or the Sci-Fi Channel (SyFy) junior year.
Indeed
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35510067
I got inspired by this the other day and made something related, though user-drawable:
https://pine.town
Obviously nowhere near as good as Floor796, but if you like pixel art, maybe you'll like my weekend hack.
Also very cool.
Thanks for sharing this one. There's so many brilliant and funny little vignettes in this piece. I'm amazed at what some people are able to do, so far outside anything I could dream about creating.
Would be interesting to give all the NPC AI, then control one and see how everything interacts, or get dropped into this in first person and interact with everything/everyone powered by AI.
Given that this is hand-crafted by a real artist, introducing AI into it would be a betrayal of the entire concept.
you're thinking of wrong kind of Ai
I don't think I am. The wording of the person's post suggests the use of LLMs, not general AI or another form.
AI != LLM
Theme Hospital is a thing.
This is one of the best things I’ve ever seen online
Haven't found Waldo yet
Edit: I absolutely did find Waldo! That was fun.
Is Waldo really there? Because I've looked everywhere, and at this point I'm a bit concerned that my eyes are going to give out before I'm able to find him. That guy sure is a wily fella.
He's really there. I was on the verge of giving up myself.
Figured I'd include a spoiler link for Waldo if anyone's tired of looking:
https://floor796.com/#t5l1,459,106
He's in the bathroom stall.
I managed to find him without help - I'm stubborn - but man, did it take me a long time to do it. It didn't help that I was constantly being distracted by some new character grabbing my attention. There's just so much here!
Here's a fun one: find AE3803
https://floor796.com/#t0l2,695,774
Had to look up who that was and then just searched for the red hat.
sites like this make the internet a better place.
Reminds me of xkcd's "Click & Drag"
https://xkcd.com/1110/
There is now a neon add for some weird place called 'Hacker News'; right between the ones for Dunder Mifflin and Weyland Yutani Corp, over by the Catbus, behind that new huge pirate ship, but if you hit the Black Mesa ad you've gone too far.
For the lazy: https://floor796.com/#t1l5,168,967
This sort of thing gives me a nice hit of nostalgia.
I am pleased things like this continue to exist on the tinterweb.
the guy must have started consuming media in the womb and has an amazing ability to capture iconic characters and moments with the smallest possible numbers of pixles, the proof of that is bieng able to identify many familiar characters, but the ones from different cultures register as extras and are devoid of personality, pattern recognition doing it's thing effortlessly. It's very much of our time, and speaks to the need for drama and absurdity, and also the role that AI is bieng pushed to fill, while showing that for true iconic imagery , human biengs still have the edge.
I think it will absorb at least as many hours as doom scrolling, and be much better for me.
One of the coolest things I've seen this year! A true labor of love!
I wish I could show my kid this incredible mega gif. But it's NSFW ;D
Mega gif indeed. Two relevant excerpts found in the about page (it's a gif but not a gif):
> Why 796?
> The name of the project has a small code: 7, 9 and 6 are the ordinal numbers of the letters in the English alphabet for the word GIF. This project is essentially one big gif, a mega gif, so all the action takes place on the 796th (GIF) floor of the space station :)
> How does animation rendering work?
In order to maintain pixel clarity and still have good compression, it was necessary to create own video format. The entire animation is divided into sections, and each section is packed into this special format. The browser then loads the desired section and renders it in a separate thread into the common canvas.
Hopefully your kids aren't working yet, so it's fair game!
Maybe their kid is called William and they meant it’s Not Safe for Will.
Amazing, real dedication and it looks so good! Have spent some time just wandering around and clicking on different characters I don't recognize. So fun
You can click on characters for context. Was this a feature last year?
Would make a great animated wallpaper.
I giggled at Monkey Island and then I saw the tentacle... but from Half Life. This is a masterpiece and it keeps on giving.
Well, there goes my carrier data plan
This is an internet masterpiece
How fast this loads is a lost art
If you're curious: the name alludes to this being the 796th floor of a space station.
And the 7th, 9th and 6th letter of the English alphabet are?
Ha! I did not notice. Thank you for sharing!
Goofy has a sound clip when you click on it. Are there other ones with sound?
Found another one. Duke Nukem 3D Cocoon with a girl. Good times!
OMG... stunning maximalism
This is incredible!
I bet there's Waldo hidden somewhere... good luck!
From the FAQ:
> You can try to find Wally (Waldo), as in the well-known game Where's Wally. He is partially visible, but if you click on him, he will appear in full and wave at you.
This is great and I love it. Very polished work.
This is a work of art. Thank you for sharing.
I love the fact that Steven Seagal made it.
So cool. Nice to see Walt and Jesse cooking
Nice, this just crashed my entire desktop.
impressive, what's your desktop?
just win10 and firefox. It wanted to run workers in firefox, locked up firefox, then somehow taskmanager was locked up and things went downhill from there.
Works for me on Win 10, Win 11, Firefox, DDG.
Probably somet=ing gone very wrong with the video drivers.
Is this the same author as goontower?
there's even a HN img reference
https://floor796.com/#t1l5,147,868
I guess that's on a different timeline than the former? S Whisman location. ;)
this is where i’d like to chill when they wake me up from the simulation.
What did they do to Muzzy?!
One of my soft milestone tests for AGI is if this gets reproduced in a World Model with Gaussian Splats or whatever it is by then that lets you do gameplay walkthrough in first player egocentric 3D-6DOF-360 view in XR with some friends till then its just all stochastic parrots on word calculators whats the point
Can we please have a room where Jake Paul and Tate are getting humbled in a boxing ring for all eternity.
[dead]
[flagged]
Many of these questions are answered in the FAQ on the site. The most important answer is that it’s just one creator as a side project.
The artwork looks amazing, is it AI/ComfyUI?
No.
What did I just click on? Love the no context drop in with 37 points and no comments.
That being said whatever this is… something
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Floor796&type=story&dateRange=...
You clicked on an art project being made as a hobby. There is an “About” link on the top left if you want to know more.