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Sodaconstructor: Interactive creations using masses and springs (2007) (sodaplay.com)
20 points by thisjepisje on July 22, 2014 | hide | past | favorite | 12 comments


Hi Fiddian here director of Soda, creators of Sodaplay. Thanks for your kind words about Sodaplay. We developed iOS and HTML5 prototypes of Sodaconstructor a while ago which work nicely. It is however a significant amount of work creating a new backend to support the million or so models we have in the database and porting the other tools like Moovl. We are planning to do a Kickstarter to raise funds for the dev work, but need to clean our database of 250,000 registered users' emails which costs money otherwise we'll be instantly blocked as spammers. I very much hope to have the Kickstarter online, bring Sodaplay up to date and reinstate a lot of the version 1 features people liked e.g the zoo!


Awesome—I would back that in a heartbeat!


I can't believe this is still online. We used to do mini competition amongst friends when this was released. There was also a huge repository of designs made by others you could try out.


A lot of old creations are stored in the sodazoo: http://archive.sodaplay.com/zoo/


When I was a kid, I was quite active in the soda race forums and the community there. In fact, my first open source project was a library for generating soda constructor models programmatically.

For example, it let you write text: http://sodaplay.com/creators/russellsprouts/items/font

Some good creators, I'm sure there are many more I'm forgetting:

http://sodaplay.com/creators/mmaarrkkuuss

http://sodaplay.com/creators/edlinfan

http://sodaplay.com/creators/grape

http://sodaplay.com/creators/jeckyll

http://sodaplay.com/creators/im_an_alien

http://sodaplay.com/creators/phider

http://sodaplay.com/creators/lectvay

http://warptera.com/

Many models are made up of motors with legs attached. Here are some interesting ones:

http://sodaplay.com/creators/motors

http://sodaplay.com/creators/other_motors

Also of interest, this paper empirically discovers the physics behind it: http://falcoprof.altervista.org/dispense/sodamathspaperfull....


Oh man, those were the days. My profile (UrbanTwitch) is still active, too. Whoa. I mostly made rollercoasters, though.

http://sodaplay.com/creators/javascript_freek


I went through a rollercoaster phase as well, lots of fun. If only I could find my account...


Blast from the past. We actually built Soda Constructor into our science museum traveling exhibit on robots (Robots and Us), way back in the early 2000s:

http://www.robotsandus.org/moving/smmconstructor/


This was one of the main inspirations for Locoroco. It's been around a lot longer than 2007 (https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://sodaplay.com)


The creatures archive goes as far back as 2000.


Omigosh I remember this. This is ooolddd but so cool. I used to mess with the creatures by dragging around the joints and such and then get freaked out when their movements changed from being lovely and life-like to being grotesque and unnerving.


I literally have been looking for this for months. Thanks!




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