On Mon, 07 May 2007 04:08:27 -0700, Karl <karl.ramberg at comhem.se> wrote:

> Cool, Squeak need more games. Have you seen the games at
> http://www.swa.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/projects/olpc/index.html

No, that's very cool.

> I been hooked on DiceWars for a few days now. It's a risk type game and  
> really addicting :-)

I'm hoping to "wrap up" with an implementation of a "Chainmail" type game.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chainmail_(game)

I've been fooling with a Seaside interface for online multiplay.

Basically, what I've been doing is writing little games like I the ones I  
copied from Ahl's books:

http://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/

then using them to explain some aspect of Squeak and/or programming in  
geneal. It's been educative, to say the least. Those old BASIC games were  
inscrutable from a distance. This is one of the better ones:

http://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/showpage.php?page=79

But, man, they were compact and to the point. I also miss being able to  
see a complete listing so much that I've considered building an editor  
that shows Smalltalk code in a scrollable format and allows editing it  
that way. (Or hoping such a thing exists already.)

Of course, it's so much easier to actually expand a game when it has a  
good design. With the very limited forms of structure available, my old  
BASIC programs used to collapse under their own weight (and sometimes  
they'd just collapse because I'd filled the 120K disk with code, heh). I  
used to say to myself, "Wow, wouldn't it be great if I could call the same  
routine, but with different variable sets, and it could call different  
routines based on what those sets represented...." I was quite  
disappointed when I couldn't say "GOSUB SomeVar$".

> Anyway, a game framework for Squeak would be really nice. I've seen a  
> few attempts at it, but nothing that has come past the initial stages.

Probably a different beast from what I've been doing--although if a get a  
really good command structure going, it could be part of a framework--but  
I agree it would be nice. I've done game frameworks before. I broke them  
up into different types of games (1D, 2D, 3D maps/1D, 2D, 3D  
graphics/real-time vs. turn based, etc. etc. etc.)

	===Blake===