About

Juicebox is news on making and playing games, and the graphics, AI, math and code around them. It gathers public feeds every half hour, and people submit links.

Pages

• Hot: the front page.
• New: newest first.
• Upcoming games: by release month.
• Calendar: events, sales and dates.
• Most played on Steam
• Releases: each engine's latest version.
• Hardware: what Steam players run, and what hardware costs.
• Markets: game and tech stocks, Bitcoin and Ether.

Points

Every story starts with points from an AI rating of how useful it is to game developers. That runs from 0 for off topic to 20 or more for the best of a week.

A story that came from a thread elsewhere (Hacker News, Lobsters, a forum, Lemmy, Bluesky, Mastodon) can start with up to double. That depends on how well the thread did against others of its age in the same place: the same forum category, Lemmy community, or Bluesky and Mastodon accounts of a similar size. The thread is read once, when Juicebox first sees it.

After that, only votes move a story. A vote is one point, up or down, one per person. Downvotes open three days after you first sign in.

Ranking

A story's place is its points times a little more for every other source carrying it, halved every 24 hours. The front page shows stories from the last 72 hours with 10 points or more, or with a vote. No source holds more than three places on a page, no site more than two, no game more than two, and no person more than one.

A story is as old as its source says: the time a thread or release was posted, or a feed dated it. A feed that dates its posts only by the day counts from when Juicebox first found the post, unless the post is more than two days old. A link you submit counts from when you submitted it.

Views

The front page has six views: Overall, Engine, Gaming, Art, Research and Industry, each hot or newest first, picked from the filter at the top of every page. A topic view lists the stories on its topic first, smaller ones included, and fills the rest of the page from the front page. It shows up to 10 stories from one source on a page, where the front page shows 3. The same AI that rates a story says which topics it is about. Your view is remembered on this device, like the theme.

On a wide screen, a sidebar beside the stories shows upcoming games, events and updates, dates for developers, the most played games on Steam, engine versions and the Steam Hardware Survey; on a narrower one the calendar icon at the top opens it. Upcoming games come from Steam's most wishlisted and from Wikipedia's yearly lists of video game releases, where a game shows once enough people read its article; a Steam game keeps Steam's date. Each other date comes from its maker's own page or from Steam, read daily. Game pictures are shown from Steam, Wikipedia or the maker's own pages and link back to them.

Release dates come from Wikipedia's release lists (CC BY-SA), each maker's own page and Steam. Juicebox isn't affiliated with Valve.

Your points

Your points are the points of what you submitted, plus the votes on your comments. Your own votes don't count toward them.

Submitting

Anyone signed in can submit a link, up to 10 a day. A link to a thread on Hacker News, Lobsters or another site counts as the article it links. A link Juicebox already has counts as your upvote on it.

Comments

Comments are threaded, and plain text: paragraphs, links, and bold between double asterisks (**like this**), nothing else. You can edit a comment for 2 hours, and delete it until someone replies. A new account can post 5 comments an hour for its first three days.

The bots

What Juicebox gathers itself is posted by five bots, one for each topic. Each bot's page lists what it posted, newest first. Bots don't vote.

When a story reaches the first page of any view, tldrbot leaves a short summary of the page it links as its first comment. A second AI checks the summary says nothing the page doesn't, and a story it can't summarize faithfully gets no comment. It doesn't summarize discussions yet.

• enginebot: Engines and their tools: releases, engine blogs and forums.
• artbot: Art and its tools: Blender, Krita, VFX and CG.
• paperbot: Research and graphics reading: papers, journals and write-ups.
• gamesbot: Games' and studios' own news.
• industrybot: The business of games, and what the wider developer sites are reading.

The crawler

Juicebox reads public pages as OneJSJuice, the name its requests carry with this page's address. Besides its feeds, it reads stores' category, product and search pages for the part prices on Hardware: at most two pages from a store each half hour, so a store's pages come round about once a day. For the stocks on Markets it reads six quote pages on Stock Analysis every 10 minutes while US markets are open, a few seconds apart, and once after each close. For the charts' earlier closes it read, once, each stock's history page on Stock Analysis and on CompaniesMarketCap, and Bitfinex's public daily prices for Bitcoin and Ether. It reads each site's robots.txt daily and obeys it, signs in nowhere, and stops reading a site for the day when the site refuses it. To keep it off a site, disallow OneJSJuice in robots.txt.

Signing in

With a code sent to your email, or with Google or GitHub. There is no password. The account is a OneJS account, the same one that signs in to play.onejs.com. A new account picks its name once, and can change it later from its own page.

Privacy

Juicebox counts its daily readers with no cookies. Each visit is reduced to a one-way hash of its IP address and browser, salted afresh every day. Each finished day is kept only as totals, so no one can be followed from one day to the next. Visits are also counted by Cloudflare Web Analytics, which sets no cookies.

Signing in sets one cookie, which keeps you signed in for 30 days. Juicebox keeps your account's name, and what you submit, comment and vote on, with when. Deleting a comment deletes its text.

Your email is kept with your OneJS account, and is only used to send sign-in codes. Juicebox holds it only for the 10 minutes a code lasts. Your IP address is used to limit how fast votes, comments and sign-in codes can come, and isn't kept.

Contact

To have something taken down, or to close your account, email hello@onejs.com.

Sources

Hacker News, Lobsters, Godot, Unreal Engine, Unity blog, Blender, Blender Developers, Krita, AMD GPUOpen, Khronos, Phaser, PlayCanvas, Defold, Bevy, GameMaker, NVIDIA Technical Blog, Steamworks, GitHub releases, Game Developer, GameFromScratch, CG Channel, Digital Foundry, GameDiscoverCo, How To Market A Game, Game File, The Game Business, PocketGamer.biz, GamesBeat, BlenderNation, Game World Observer, MobileGamer.biz, Naavik, PC Gamer, arXiv cs.GR, Graphics Programming Weekly, JCGT, ACM SIGGRAPH Blog, Simon Willison, Quanta, Hugging Face Blog, Hugging Face Papers, dev.to, Blender Artists, Real-Time VFX, three.js forum, Babylon.js forum, Defold forum, Lemmy gamedev, itch.io featured, Bluesky, Mastodon, Path of Exile 2, Counter-Strike 2, Apex Legends, Valve / Steam, Stardew Valley, Minecraft, Roblox DevForum, PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS, Dota 2, Phantom Blade Zero, Deadlock, AION 2, Call of Duty (Modern Warfare 4, Warzone), Cyberpunk 2077, Grand Theft Auto V, WARDOGS, Rust, Probably Stolen, Delta Force, War Thunder, Team Fortress 2, Slay the Spire 2, Valheim, ARC Raiders, Warframe, Enshrouded, Rainbow Six Siege, EA SPORTS FC 27, Overwatch, Dead by Daylight, Marvel Rivals, Escape from Tarkov, World of Tanks, Rocket League, Old School RuneScape, Wube Software, Facepunch Studios, Europa Universalis V, Stellaris, Victoria 3, Crusader Kings III, Age of Wonders 4, Hearts of Iron IV, Cities: Skylines II, Embark Studios, Molly Rocket (Casey Muratori), Keen Software House (Marek Rosa), Positech Games (Cliff Harris), Terrible Toybox (Ron Gilbert, Grumpy Gamer), Mohawk Games (Soren Johnson, Designer Notes), Spiderweb Software (Jeff Vogel), Bay 12 Games, and whatever people submit.