HTML5-based physics simulation for building and animating springy creations (peterfidelman.github.io)

Sodaplay! That brings up fond memories… The original page was a good example of an early (highly–) interactive playground. Some of the user-contributed constructions/creatures were simply amazing.

Oh wow, this is awesome! As you can see by my username, this was influential enough to me as a kid that I named my online presence after it. My whole 6th grade class got into it―particularly making Line-Rider-equse roller coasters with the beta version.

It was really fun being able to immediately load something from the "zoo", and reverse engineer how the mechanisms worked, and try to implement it yourself.

Nice, a clone of Soda Constructor!

I once went to a talk by the creator, Ed Burton. His message at the time was that you should not be afraid that people will use your product totally different than you intended. I can't remember his intentions, but they were very different and he was amazed by how people started to use it and what they created with it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soda_Constructor

Sodaplay was an inspiration for LocoRoco

Hey, what a nice memory! I recall playing this for a while waaaayyy back.

I've pushed some minor css that will prevent from select text when dragging points around

Awesome :) Iirc there was a kickstarter to port SodaPlay to HTML5 in 2015 but it failed. I've been meaning to make my own port, it's great to see this here!

I wonder, does this accurately simulate the original physics? My own attempts at ended up with a slightly different feel to the physics.

Here’s the source code:

https://github.com/OpenConstructor/OpenConstructor

I don’t know what might have come before it, but Xspringies [0] was my first exposure to something like this. Must have been late 80’s early 90’s.

[0] https://github.com/dharmatech/agave#springies

In 2000, I went to the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair with a CS project inspired by sodaplay, but which let the creatures mate and mutate to evolve locomotion over time. Super cool to see it updated to run on the web!