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