Show HN: Koi.rest – watch some fish and regain your balance(koi.rest)

74 pointsby hxii2 hours ago12 comments

dylanhoulia minute ago
Cool idea but as some others have said the website was running quite slow for me. I noticed it at first when hovering over the 'enter' button (so before even loading the pond) because the hover animation on the button kicked in really late feeling.
Then actually entering took a few seconds and it was quite laggy looking at all the fish.
Once those things are fixed I think the idea is neat. It would be cool to be able to interact with the pond in some way (click lily pads, drop food in the water, click the water to make it splash) but that might not be what you're going for with this
hatthew25 minutes ago
It's running at 3fps or something like that. Is that a me problem or a "lots of traffic" problem?
pozol30 minutes ago
This is great! The sounds and visuals are a great way to recenter. Only UX thing I’d say, is it would be nice, and less distracting, if other “users/koi” popping in instead kind of faded in. Them suddenly appearing kind of pulls you out of the zen mode. Awesome idea!
marcuskaz21 minutes ago
Too many koi fish is stressful (and slow)
I'd love a version without the multiplayer and just zen
- mcint16 minutes ago
  Looks like it locks the number when you first load. I had it open for 30 minutes, with just 3 fish, but after reading your comment, re-opened to find 3 dozen.
  Choice about busyness would be nice.
jeromechooan hour ago
This is neat. I like the zen background sounds. I'm particularly fascinated by digital third places with extremely limited social interaction (like cursor camp by Neal). I think it has something to do with the impossibility of something like this happening in real life.
That said, I'm not sure how real the "koi you see are other people visiting the pond together with you" bit is. I only ever saw 3 swimming koi. Maybe that's the base.
- hxiian hour ago
  Hey! That’s the base, correct. Three are always there so if someone joins and nobody else is using it – they’re never alone.
  In essence, when you someone joins the counter goes up and another koi will spawn locally.
  It’s a bit nerfed from my initial idea to sync the movement of each koi, but I might do that in the future.
  It looks like the way I deployed (Railway) it causes `429 Too Many Requests` to be returned, so I’ll definitely have to look into that. But it’s 1:21 AM so tomorrow.
  Thank you for letting me know!
  - p1necone22 minutes ago
    I noticed the koi pop in and out of existence on visible parts of the screen - it would be nice if incoming koi swam into frame from offscreen, and outgoing koi swam offscreen before disappearing.
- applfanboysbgonan hour ago
  It appeared to be real earlier, or at least simulated being real. I watched for 10 minutes and there were ~10 koi in my pool, with koi routinely flickering in and out of existence as though they suddenly joined or left. That said, I see three static koi now. Entirely conceivably that HN killed the backend and triggered a failsafe.
  - keithnz27 minutes ago
    lots and lots of koi at the moment!
Cider9986an hour ago
I really like the UI especially the about page. I don't think you are supposed to be able to see the about page on the playing page (it took a bit to start and then started when I was in about) but it looks good there with the blur.
Here's a list of other sound/relaxation websites: https://fmhy.net/audio#ambient-relaxation.
This one is pretty funny but not relaxing to me. It may be a covid remnant: https://imisstheoffice.eu/
Jtarii16 minutes ago
You might want to prompt ChatGPT to increase the frame rate of the fish animation.
- ecto13 minutes ago
  You might want to prompt for some manners, and why humans have them.
wateralien27 minutes ago
I do this with the screensavers on the Apple TV device. They’re amazing.
grvdrm22 minutes ago
Awesome. Top of bookmark list for a daily zen!
_qua15 minutes ago
Love it
suzukivenom29 minutes ago
thanks! had a really rough day
animanoiran hour ago
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