Game design question...
karl
karl.ramberg at comhem.se
Mon May 7 20:19:17 UTC 2007
Blake wrote:
> 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 barely understand most stuff in those old machines, I can get a little
glimpse of what goes on but I don't really understand. More advanced
machines I'm just happy as long as they work, the complexities
underneath the hood is just too much for mere a mortal :-)
>
> 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.
That is true. What they also got 'right' in a way was that you had less
distractions from computing. No widows or menus or anything just a
blinking cursor and a manual. It was less daunting than starting to
learn to program a computer now, in many ways. But much worse from a
productivity perspective.
>
>> 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.
There are other browsers out there that you could try, StarBrowser and
whisker comes to mind. I often miss a tabbed browser so I could keep the
number of windows down.
>
>> 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.
Cool, I have never thought about it like that. I looked around a little
and downloaded Eddie Cottongims Wargame again. I think it can be a nice
starting point.
Karl
Karl
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