Moomai’s almost-beta testing phase is moving along at a friendly pace, and I thought I’d share this really great bit of community-powered pixel art that our tiny population of about 5 dozen testers have put together over the past month or so.
The pixel-quilt concept was something I came up with years ago back when I was spending every waking moment coming up with weird crap to throw on highfiber. Originally, it was supposed to be a huge shared image that everybody could work on, an idea which was quaint and just barely feasible back in 2002. In this AJAX-powered day and age though, it’s hard not to run into major concurrency issues when you’ve got multiple users trying to push the same pixels at the same time. In the current incarnation, everybody gets to manage their own quilt by drawing individual patches and laying them out any way they want. Yes, believe it or not, all this artwork was created by hand by some fairly dedicated members, using moomai’s in-browser pixel-art editor. (As you can probably guess, I’m pretty proud of this bit of javascript; even got to learn a little bit of ImageMagick while I was at it.)
We aggregate everybody’s patches on the fly into a single massive community quilt, which is what you’re looking at here. (You can also grab and remix patches created by other users, just to add to the creative chaos.)
Moomai is still invitation-only, but I’m trying to build up the testing population quickly so we can start really stressing the server and see where the (inevitable) holes are. If you want to help out, invitations can be requested here.