All of this is extremely beta - it does not work on touchscreen devices, for example. Right now i am trying to figure out if people would actually use this.
You can receive updates about project status by subscribing to @Minefield.Zone telegram channel
Table of contents
What is it?
The idea behind this project is pretty simple and can be summarized like this:
- There is a 1920x1080 canvas, on which everyone can place pixels in 16 different colors
- When placing a pixel, you may assign label (no longer than 200 characters) and link to it.
- When other users hover their mouse pointers over the pixel you placed for longer than 0.25 seconds, label that you assigned to the pixel will be displayed in the tooltip nearby, and if they click on it – they will follow the link you specified
- You can place your pixels over pixels of other people. Conversly, other users may place their pixels over yours.
- Placing pixels, however, is not free: every user of this service has an account, and each account has a pixel balance. In order to place one pixel on canvas, you need to spend one pixel from your account.
- Pixels can be acquired only by mining: you point your monero miner to pool1.minefield.zone:5555, specify your numerical user id as the login, and for every share you solve you receive one pixel
- Use it or lose it: if pixel you mined is not placed on canvas within 10 minutes, it will be lost. It will disappear. It won't be there anymore. It will be wiped out of server's memory. It's existence will end. It will be T-E-R-M-I-N-A-T-E-D.
- One interesting consequence of this is that if there are two users with exactly the same amount of processing power competing for the same piece of canvas, then the one that placed his pixels earlier and kept mining uncontested for some time afterwards, will get to keep his place on canvas. Something i would very much like you to think about :)
Mining your first pixel
Since 30.07.2020 every new user recieves 24 free pixels after creating an account (assuming that nobody in the last 6 hours created an account using the same ipv4 IP. Skip to the next section and return back if you want to get more.
In order to place a pixel you need to acquire it first. As previously discussed, it can be done by instructing your monero miner to mine at pool1.minefield.zone:5555 while using your numerical user ID as a login. Once you've solved a share (at the moment of writing these words, mining difficulty is set to 36000), your pixel balance will be increased by one, which you will be able to see at bottom-left corner of the screen:
If you don't know how to do that, continue reading this section. So, in order to start mining pixels you need to:
- Download the miner itself from here. If you don't trust direct links, you can go to the miners github release page and download it from here.
Note that modern browsers consider this file to be malicious because quite a few people out there are trying to make others mine for them, just like i am trying right now, except that you are aware that i am trying to make you do that, and those unfortunate people do not.
- Then you need to download the config file. You can do that by clicking link [3] from the popup that shows up when you login
- Unpack archive which you downloaded in the first step somewhere, and then copy config.json into the same directory. Overwrite config.json that was present here.
- Launch start.cmd. Once miner initialization is complete, you should see something like that:
- Some time after that you should start receiving "accepted" messages. Every time one of those appears, you should get one (or more, if you have a multiplying bonus) pixel.
With current difficulty (36000) and i5-3210M CPU you should receive one pixel approximately every minute.
In case you are wondering: screenshots were taken in a test environment, which is way mining difficulty is set to 3250 and why IP of the mining pool is 192.168.168.0.101
- There are, of course, ways to increase mining performance (launching miner as an Administrator, for example), but to find out about those you will have to look elsewhere, at least for now.
Interface modes and placing your first pixel
Once you've mined your first pixel, you should place it on canvas as soon as possible: remember, otherwise after 10 minutes you will lose it!
In order to do that, however, you need to learn about interface modes first. Look at the bottom right corner of the interface. You should see something like this there: 
By clicking on this element of interface you can cycle through different modes of which there are three:
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EXPLORE - Exploration mode
This is the default mode which is used for, believe it or not, canvas exploration: in it you can drag it around, zoom in and out using the mouse wheel and, finally, see labels and follow links that other users left. You can not switch into other modes if you are not logged in.
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EDIT - Editing mode
This mode is used to manually place pixels on canvas, and it will be discussed in this section.
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AUTO - Automatic placement mode
In this mode you can draw on canvas even when you don't have any pixels. There is one downside, though: if you don't have any pixels, then you will be the only one who will see them.
Or, in other words, in this mode you can specify an image and your client will automatically place them on canvas once you have enough pixels to do that. If someone else places pixel above one you've placed, and if you have enough pixels to 'undo' that - your client will do that, as long as it is active (e.g. as long as you are logged in and browser window is open).
So, to place the pixel, do the following:
- Switch into "EDIT" mode
-
Type URL and label you would like to assign to the pixel in the input field at the bottom of the screen:
If URL you would like to add is, for example, http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/, and label you would like to assign to the pixel is "LARPing as Jar Jar Abrahms: homages and shit!", then this is what you should type:
http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/|LARPing as Jar Jar Abrahms: homages and shit!
Which, upon actually typing it, will look like that:
- Pick a color. Where color picker is should be obvious, but in case you missed it - it is between the input field and mode indicator
- Click on the place you want to put pixel on
Automatic placement mode
As was previously mentioned, there is an automatic pixel placement mode, which can place pre-defined set of pixels on canvas when your pixel balance becomes larger than zero.
As far as pixel placement interface goes, it works in exactly the same way it does in "EDIT" mode, with one exception: if you right-click on one of the pixels you've placed, it will be removed from the pattern.
Note that automatic pixel placement works only if you are in other modes. If you want to stop it, you will have to wipe out the automatic pattern. That can be achieved by either right-clicking it away or by reloading page and logging in again (patterns exist only within your browsers memory, and are wiped away on reloads)
Rules
- No nazi stuff
- No messages that promote violence
- No malware
- Politics is allowed, as long as messages and sites that are linked don't break previous three rules
If you break those rules, you will lose the ability to place pixels on canvas.
Since i am not an unreasonable man, i will leave your ability to mine and see the amount of your pixels increase intact, though.
If you want to contact me, send an email to [email protected]