3D engine made of MS Excel formulae | Hacker News Reader

3D engine made of MS Excel formulae

gamasutra.com

193 pointsjbawgs32 comments

As an excel developer in the 90's, this brings up great memories. I wrote the Doom Excel credits in Office 95. I wish I'd had thought of doing this instead. Kudos.

(Sending some kudos your way, too, having lost many an hour to that Easter egg on otherwise-game-deprived school machines.)

Do you think there's anyway that something like that could be shipped by Microsoft these days?

Not at MSFT but no. Easter Eggs aren’t worth the security risk of added code.

See ‘Trustworthy Computing’ initiative from the 2000s.

A dev on my team wrote the following Excel 2000 credits (it was a flying carpet-like game). Afaik that was around the time BillG put his foot down and mandated no new credits. Enterprise customers felt these credits were both a sign of wasted engineering time ("you could have fixed x bugs instead!" and wasted disk space. It's logical, but only partly true. Shipping software on CD means a very long stabilization phase. You couldn't really "fix more bugs" because every bug fix had a risk of introducing another one. That means some Office teams would literally complete their work a year before shipping. They'd sit around half-heartedly helping other teams. That's when someone would take time to write credits. These credits were often tightly-optimized C and assembly, taking very little space. The facts couldn't overcome the optics, so that was the end of fun Microsoft credits.

Ah, HN. I came to comment "anyone remember the Doom engine in Excel 95?" And instead the top comment is "I wrote the Doom engine in Excel 95".

Can't top that. Kudos, sir.

My brain is desperately attempting to recall the sequence of steps to open it. Ctrl + Shift, clicking something in the Help -> About... dialog box, then F5 or something? And/or there was a star-wars scroller in one of other apps, right?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb9AXBowb0E

I remember the flight sim easter egg in Excel 97, that was certainly unexpected!

Was the Excel 95' Doom written in VBA or something else?

Spreadsheets in general and Excel in particular are magic. It is very likely that spreadsheets were the killer application that drove the demand for PC's by businesses.

Spreadsheets are truly the programming tool of the masses (who don't even necessarily think they are programming).

Since Excel is a pure functional programming paradigm, I suppose this will make FP people happy to see FP taken so far without mixing in any imperative constructs. It's the Übermensch of functional 3d engines.

calling this a functional 3d engine is a stretch, but sure grats functional programming, you have entered the 80s

I just watched a talk this morning about doing high dynamic range photography in Excel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkQJdaGGVM8). Looks like now I've got something to watch tomorrow!

that is great, both of these reminded me of deepexcel: multi-layer neural networks implemented with a spreadsheet!:

http://www.deepexcel.net/

I really like how the only VBA macros are for catching key inputs so you don’t have to manually update your location cell.

Most “look what this crazy person built in excel!” things end up really having VBA do all the work.

That's very neat. Another nice example of the power of excel and spreadsheets in general is the fast.ai course, almost all of the basics are covered in spreadsheets.

This is crazy. I'm pretty floored that someone did something like this.

Then again, we've all seen (or worse, have been roped into trying to convert!) some of the crazy Excel monstrosities some manager wrote that runs an entire company or such!

Prior to seeing this, I had found (somewhere - dunno if it still exists out there) a "tutorial" on how a neural network works - and the whole thing was done as an Excel worksheet. I thought that was pretty insane at the time...

As a less extreme example, an implementation of the AES cipher in Excel formulas (no macros): https://www.nayuki.io/page/aes-cipher-internals-in-excel

That reminds me of when my mother-in-law asked me if you could compute IBAN check digits in Excel. The suggestion by IT had been to cut-and-paste customer data into a random "compute IBAN check digit" website, one customer at a time, because they couldn't be arsed to update the database automatically.

I've always thought a data-centered programming language that compiles to an Excel spreadsheet would be a Fun Challenge™ and possibly even useful. Spreadsheets are an amazing tool. This is an amazing demonstration.

Could be rewrited for LibreOffice Calc?

It renders in LibreOffice - although I wasn't able to get the movement to work, even after enabling macros.

Try logging a bug, I know it might seem ridiculous but it may help with efforts to improve VBA compatibility.

Sadly LibreOffice ignores user bug reports.

What? Why?

Hardly. Why do you say that? I have personally worked on bugs reported by end users.

That's been my experience. Bugs reported and then either ignored or closed as duplicates of ancient bugs.

See https://tommorris.org/posts/9491 (not my post, but similar experience).

Half of the problems listed are about how the app doesn't provide macOS-specific integrations. The rest are very minor usability issues that might have valid justifications for being that way. I am not inclined to view these as being terribly legitimate complaints.

That's a blog post, did they log actual bugs?

That reminds me of people doing 3-D engines in MegaZeux.

http://vault.digitalmzx.net/screens2/cde248323538306a9712eb9...

MegaZeux is a ZZT successor.

https://image.dosgamesarchive.com/screenshots/zzt4.gif

And uses ASCII characters. MegaZeux up'd the ante and allowed you to edit the VGA text glyphs so you could make "sprites."

Back-in-the-day Megazeux and ZZT were like their own dedicated systems, like software console systems. It was really fun to see what people did with incredibly constrained systems.

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