Elite trade engine in C | Hacker News Reader

Elite trade engine in C

iancgbell.clara.net

44 pointsshawndumas13 comments

Note that this is the site of Ian Bell, co-creator of the original Elite game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Bell_(programmer)

Really good video "postmortem" of the game by the other co-creator: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014628/Classic-Game-Postmortem

Worth reviewing now that so many hackers are getting into 0x10c (largely based on the same game).

When I first saw Notch's page about 0x10c, my takeaway was, "This guy is going to try making a cross between Elite and Minecraft."

And I squealed like a little girl. Because I've wanted a game like that for a long time, and have even made a few game prototypes of my own in that feature space.

Yeah. I think this will end up being a great way to teach kids an assembly language. Usually, you end up doing lame assembly projects like lighting a few diodes or dispensing change from an imaginary vending machine.

When I learned assembly, the class had us typing our programs into a Vax computer older than I am and watching everything execute in a debugger and doing page after page after page of hex math by hand, or writing out the actual hex values for our programs by hand. To this day, I remember that 0x20FE is the shortest infinite loop. Every byte wasted lowered your grade. That was all very educational, but not the least bit fun. The best part was at the very end of the class where I learned a bunch of cool tricks from reading the professor's solutions. He wouldn't show us any of them until the whole course was over.

With the DCPU, your programs might help you destroy enemy space ships, mine and scan for resources, or even hack enemy computers. It could become almost like the demo scene of old and knowing Notch, it will be waaaaaaay more fun than learning assembly usually is.

What I can't wait for is someone to make a higher level language that will compile down to DCPU

There are already C compilers. I think there were one or two other languages, as well, but I haven't checked recently, so there might be several more by now at the rate things are going...

There is an LLVM backend and clang can use it.

That means C/C++ code can be written and compiled down to DCPU16. You could even write your own programming language (like BASIC) and have it compile down to DCPU16.

For those, such as myself, who have not seen Elite before. Here is a youtube vid of some gameplay.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuvbZpH1QuE

Good to see this. I've been building computer games for decades and one hack I learned early was that it was much easier to make a game with only a text-based interface, whether CLI/REPL or curses-like. (Like my Rogue-like, Dead By Zombie.) It puts constraints on what kinds of UI features you can have, and it puts a ceiling on how visually beautiful you can make it. But it does allow you to knock out features at a higher velocity. A much higher percentage of your work is spent on the core game engine and game mechanics, with only a thin slice spent on the UI layer.

would you please change that background? I stopped reading after 5 words. I need my eyes, you know?

I like seeing these kinds of pages once in a while. Makes me nostalgic over the early days of the Internet, though it's missing a javascript popup asking for your name followed by an alert greeting you by name to the site.

txtelite port compilable on unix : gcc -o txtelite txtelite.c -lm

https://gist.github.com/2347664

didn't those guys hear about Github ;)

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