[Some pre-emptive Q&A about the custom wplace client]


Q: Why?
A: Because I thought it would look cool. Indeed, it looks cool.


Q: Why does the map look like that?
A: This is a 100% from-scratch implementation of the wplace frontend. I did some very basic reverse engineering of the official frontend (figured out how the tiles work) and then did my own thing from there. I chose OpenStreetMap for the background, which clearly has a different look compared to whatever Wplace is using.


Q: Is this breaking the site policy?
A: I don't believe so. The tile data endpoints are pretty much unsecured. They are like any other PNG file on the internet. I am creating a site which performs the very mundane task of embedding (thousands of) images from another site. The wplace server admins could very easily filter this traffic if they wanted to.


Q: That's a lot of pixels! Does this eat RAM/bandwidth?
A: Surprisingly no. The images coming in from the backend are well optimized (they seem to correctly use an indexed color model) and I'm confident that you could run this frontend on your phone if you wanted. The main limiting factor, as with the normal Wplace client, is the obscene rate limiting going on. The rate limit kicks in seemingly whenever it wants to- I can't find any pattern. It's nuts. Both my client and the official client accomodate the rate limiting with *persistence*, repeatedly fetching tiles without care for the errors.


Q: ...Persistence? How long does it take to load?
A: The larger of the 2 screenshots took several minutes to load (though I still need to tune the intervals).


Q: Just how far you can zoom out?
A: There is no inherent cap. If you disable the cap and zoom all the way out, you will start downloading the entire world. Obviously you'll be waiting a long time. I tried to download all of wplace for fun using 8 separate IPs, and it would've taken several days had I actually gone through with it.


Q: Can you take a screenshot of [X]?
A: Of course! Though, depending on the size of [X], it could take a long time.


Q: Will you make this public?
A: Absolutely (when it's done)!


Q: What other plans do you have for this project?
A: Having a fully custom client opens the doors up to a lot of things. I'm not interested in using this client to do anything other than *read* info from the wplace backend (no painting from here!) as that would be firmly entering bot territory. I'm thinking more like, a "travel to coordinates" feature (why don't they have this?), a "download" feature, a spy feature, etc.