The world does have an edge.

It just takes a while to get there.

Try it yourselves: just click and drag.

+1 for that first SMB level in there

It sort of reminds me of this: http://www.360cities.net/gigapixel/strahov-library.html (the library is actually open for public, though I doubt they would let me to browse through their books....

)

Wow, it's big!

I was curious to see as much as possible, but you can spend hours scrolling through this. So I did some reverse engineering. It consists of tiles, each of which is 2048 x 2048 pixels. I made a small Java program to automatically find and download all the tiles. It found 225 tiles. There are rockets, jellyfish, whales, pirate ships, wind mills, bridges, towers, airplanes, caves etc.

The code of my little program is too ugly and too embarrassing to post here.

And that when you realized: "man, I really do have too much free time on my hands..."?

Oh dear god... I got lost in the underground. That place is massive.

Martin Vajsar wrote:It just takes a while to get there.

It did take me a while to get there. But I was constantly haunted by the fear that I might be missing something as I scrolled along.

News at 11: "For some unknown reason geek productivity fell sharply today."

Paul Clapham wrote:

Martin Vajsar wrote:It just takes a while to get there.

It did take me a while to get there. But I was constantly haunted by the fear that I might be missing something as I scrolled along.

It goes both left and right of the start position right?

I started going right of the start position, went underground which took me far to the left and then came up to a spot I didn't recognize. I assumed I went farther to the left then the start point

Yes, I went right as far as possible, mostly following the black-white boundary, and eventually got to the edge of the world.

I didn't do the same for the leftward direction because of the risk of repetitive strain injury from click, drag, click, drag.

Jesper de Jong wrote:There are rockets, jellyfish, whales, pirate ships, wind mills, bridges, towers, airplanes, caves etc.

It's amazing. I love the lemonade stand! I'm sure there are references I'm missing. I think the woman climbing the rigging is Elizabeth Warren. Can anyone explain the huts and the graveyard near what looks like a flying saucer?

My favorite one is Red 5, flying out of the tunnel, calling in his task-complete to Gold Leader. Unfortunately he is about to die because the tunnel gets too thin very quickly

How long did it take xkcd to draw it?!

For anyone who got bored of scrolling, someone helpfully did this: http://xkcd-map.rent-a-geek.de

Ah, cool. I had gotten as far as figuring out how to retrieve the individual png files, but at work I didn't have time to put them together into one big image. I had wondered how many more easter eggs would be off the main path.

Steve Luke wrote:My favorite one is Red 5, flying out of the tunnel, calling in his task-complete to Gold Leader. Unfortunately he is about to die because the tunnel gets too thin very quickly

Ah, but how did he get in in the first place? Maybe the tunnel is wider in the dimension perpendicular to the screen, and he can just roll 90 degrees to one side to fit through.

Well OK, that's still pretty thin. So I think there have to be other tunnels outside the plane shown. Or he never could have gotten in.

I sure hope one appears soon though, or the lemonade stand is toast.

Jelle Klap wrote:And that when you realized: "man, I really do have too much free time on my hands..."?

I think that scrolling through the whole world would have taken a lot longer than quickly hacking my little program together.

Matthew Brown wrote:For anyone who got bored of scrolling, someone helpfully did this: http://xkcd-map.rent-a-geek.de

Now that was someone with too much free time on their hands...

Matthew Brown wrote:For anyone who got bored of scrolling, someone helpfully did this: http://xkcd-map.rent-a-geek.de

Oh, dear. That version is missing a LOT.

Dennis Deems wrote:Oh, dear. That version is missing a LOT.

You sure? Seemed pretty comprehensive to me, though you do need to zoom around to find everything. Can you give an example of what's missing?

I don't believe it goes all the way to the right-hand side of the original. In the original there's a person there (with a balloon if I recall right, I'm not going back to scroll a thousand times again) but in that version I didn't see that person there.

Paul Clapham wrote:I don't believe it goes all the way to the right-hand side of the original. In the original there's a person there (with a balloon if I recall right, I'm not going back to scroll a thousand times again) but in that version I didn't see that person there.

http://xkcd-map.rent-a-geek.de/#10/1.5839/134.8531

You mean the person saying "I wonder where I'll float next" as he holds the baloon string and floats off the edge of the cliff? He's there. But that's not the end of the image - just the end of the interesting part.

Wow, same second.

For clarity, I was replying to Paul. Matthew and I are already on the same page.