World: r3wp

Mostly Ruby and a bit Java => http://rubility.heroku.com; It's in 
very early stages though. At the moment I am creating the underlying 
technologies for the game and the virtual computer it runs on. Well, 
let's call it a virtual virtual computer since I use a very easy 
trick to simulate a virtual computer :p (the game is an MDI app, 
and "apps" in the game are just MDI windows)

I did start writing a Rogue like game with Rebol today though :) 
I did try to make a jump and run game half a year ago when I first 
started to learn Rebol, but the keyboard events made that impossible 
(at least for me because I don't know if you can improve the event 
system). It takes a few seconds until the keyboard event is sent 
continually when you press and hold a key, like for walking left 
or right. For the rogue like game this isn't a problem since you 
always move one step at a time which also acts as a turn in the game.

the R2 event system has severe limitations.  for gaming its almost 
unusable unless you really hack it, and even then, you don't get 
key UP events so its hard to do a lot of types of games.

Which is sad because the drawing capabilities of Rebol are pretty 
cool. I got tile based map rendering and scrolling working in 5 minutes 
tops :)

yep  it is a shame .

I guess Rebol 3 will improve that. I hope.

yes and we'll have access to the event mechanism at some point via 
the extension.  so we can customize it for specific needs if its 
really necessary.

Me too on the hope.  I took a crack at a game in REBOL once. But 
I could not get my head round some of the event handling.  Drawing 
was easy (umm, for a stick figure artist type ala moi that is, if 
not 'good').    ;)

Stick figure graphics are really popular nowadays if you look at 
some of the top iPhone games :)

http://uni.xkcd.com/wicked interface on a wicked comic

When you visit, try the sequence...

make me a sandwich
sudo make me a sandwich

one of my favourite gags ever.

hahaha

the help command is also VERY usefull hahaha

Has anyone done some Corewar simulator in Rebol? I just remembered 
this cool game.

I thought about the same thing a few years ago Robert. I found that 
I still have old downloads from looking into it, but no REBOL code.

Ok. I can imagine an online-version where you play life against others.

I have a REBOL version of CoreWars, made in 2008. Search for "corewars" 
in group "Chat". As I remember, the last part of the asm macros isn't 
made, and it's slow compared to a compiled version. I can send you 
the code, if you like.

That would be nice. Thanks.

I can imagine using Cyphre's JIT compiler to speed it up :-)

Robert, I sent you an email.

This could become a great game for web designers 
http://yizzle.com/whatthehex/

I did very well (almost perfect), but I'm not used to lower case 
letters.  That messes me up)

sometimes i did think the color would be more bright than it actually 
was, but otherwise it's easy at the default difficulty level (i did 
not try other levels)

At level 48 is really hard, I've hit the right color only once at 
the first guess.

pixel breakout http://wonderfl.net/c/tNGi/fullscreen

I just got STARCRAFT 2   ... only 10 years waiting.

my programming might be a bit affected  ;-)

see you later, next year...

Only 10 years? Try waiting for twelve :) It's addictive, I already 
played for about 8 hours I think and I usually put down 99% of games 
after 10 to 20 minutes, even if they are really good. But I want 
to play the Zerg -.- Can't wait for the addon to come out. I hope 
they don't release the Protoss addon first. Did you buy the special 
edition? I thought long and hard about it (90 Euros!!) but then I 
thought, if Blizzard does what they did with World of Warcraft, there 
will be a special edition of every addon too, so you'd have to pay 
nearly 300 Euro all together. So I just bought the standart edition 
and will buy the special edition of the Zerg addon ;)

is PC gaming any better or easier nowadays? I haven't really played 
since 2004.

Isn't Starcraft-2 an very old game? IIRC I have an old Amiga version.

I have stopped playing since I'm 18 or so... the addiction factor 
is just to high.

No, Starcraft II was just released by Blizzard.  Sequel to Starcraft, 
a Windows game from 1998

And, this release only allows playing as Terran?  Guess I really 
am not buying it...

when playing multiplayer, you can play any of the three races.

I agree that is addictive as hell, and also much more challenging 
than previous versions.


I've never been annihilated so often playing this kind of game before.

henrik, what do you mean by "easier".

the SC2 campain is terran, but it has a few protoss missions In it 
so far.    the way the story is unwinding, I think there will be 
some Zerg scenarios also.

I must say, the story is much better than SC1 too.

only down side is that its a resource hog.  but that's to be expected 
with the level of detail in the game engine.  putting settings to 
low will allow the game to play on older machines without a glitch 
though...  it seems to be much more demanding on OSX.

Ah, good.  Maaaybe I will, then...

That's the irk I have with PC gaming: That you have to upgrade your 
hardware every 6 months and wrestle with drivers. I advised my nephew 
again to get into PC gaming for those reasons as I don't want to 
change the diapers on his PC, every time something doesn't play.

nephew against

well, there was a big shift in games about 2-3 years ago.  they where 
holding back because of a lot of older computers... but when vista 
came out  it had DX11 and computer users where forced to upgrade. 
 even those that didn't need to before.

a big step in GFx occured at about the same time, you could actually 
call it a leap.   Hardware shaders, better illuminations and gfx 
ram jumped to be 256MB at minimum on most cards.


but most games of today allow very low settings which allow you to 
work on older machines... I've got a 4 year old 1.5Ghz core duo with 
an old 8600M nvidia card.


and SC2 is quite responsive on it.  though I would like to play with 
a bit more graphics quality... its not the game's fault.  4-5 years 
ago 3D game graphics quality was still pretty deficient.  but with 
any average 100$ card today,  you'll get pretty amazing graphics.

Henrik: I played games on my as cheap as you can get 5 year old single 
core 450 Euro computer just fine, including the newest just released 
games. You don't have to buy a new computer every couple of months, 
you just can't set the graphic settings very high. So in effect, 
when you buy a new computer you are not paying to play new games 
but to play games in better quality. Now after these five years I 
bought another 450 euro computer just two weeks ago, with 4GB RAM, 
4x2,8 Ghz CPU and an Nvidia GT320 with 1GB VRAM, this will work for 
the next 5 years too I believe :)

Maxim: I really hope there are Zerg bonus missions. I just played 
through all the protoss ones. Some of those were really, really tough. 
And I'm playing on normal difficulty, can't imagine playing these 
on hard.

finished the game today... no zerg missions.  :-(


actually , I was disapointed by the last mission.  I hoping for a 
huge slugfest, but in fact the last protoss mission is much more 
"end of campaign" like.

the one thing I like less about this campaign is that perhaps half 
or more of the missions are very short, "do this quickly" 20 minute 
missions.     I was hoping that there would be many more massive 
maps to purge, like in broodwar.

A.I. games are much more challenging.   we can't turtle anymore. 
 and the labels to the hard levels are very representative...  very 
hard. is well... VERY hard.  I can't even begin to wonder how the 
insane level works out.

Finished it today too, some time this morning. Played the whole damn 
night yesterday, I was shocked when the sun rose :) Yeah the end 
left a lot to be desired but Starcraft 2 is a trilogy, so that was 
to be expected. I only hope Blizzard will really manage to get the 
second game out in just one year. I can't really see that happening. 
It'll probably be 3 or 4 years. Did you get to play all missions? 
My mission counter says 25 of 26 missions completed. Where's the 
26th mission and why wasn't I able to play it? ^^ And if I do count 
by myself I get to 28 completed missions in the mission archive anyhow 
so maybe their mission counter is just one big bug. The missions 
are very short but I'd say it took me between 30 and 50 minutes for 
each mission and with 28 missions + 4 bonus protoss missions, this 
is a whole lot of content. Most games only give you 7 to 12 hours 
of gameplay (some a lot less, some a lot more). Starcraft 2 took 
me over 20 hours to play through. And then you still got challenge 
missions, multiplayer, custom maps Vs A.I, user contributed missions 
thanks to the level editor, etc.