On Mon, 07 May 2007 11:56:47 -0700, Karl <karl.ramberg at comhem.se> wrote:

> Brings back memories from typing in program listing from magazines :-)  
> Those where the days...

I've often felt that the Apple ][, with all its crudeness and limitations,  
came very close to Alan Kay's notion of a machine you could understand  
 from top to bottom.

I suppose some people just typed in the listings and played them as-is.  
But I ultimately ran into a significant subset of all the problems I've  
ever encountered hacking those things.

> You could of course use the fileout format and write the whole thing in  
> a workplace ;-)

Heh. Not quite what I had in mind. Visual Basic had a thing where it set  
up lines between subroutines. I didn't like it there because VB code is  
one big text dump. But someting like that in ST could be useful. I find I  
end up with half-a-dozen browsers open to get a fraction of the info a  
listing would give.

> 2D would suffice I guess, classes for graphics handling,  etc. I have  
> never made such a framework. I'll look around a little on the net and  
> see what I can come up with.

Well, I always liked to distinguish between the gameplay dimensions and  
the graphics dimensions. Like, Monopoly is what I would call a 1D game. A  
unidirectional 1D game, even. (You can only move along one axis and only  
in one direction along that axis). But there are 3D representations of it.

But that's a whole nother story.