Show HN: Space Trader (Ported from Palm OS to Vanilla JavaScript and HTML) | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Space Trader (Ported from Palm OS to Vanilla JavaScript and HTML)

memalign.github.io

8 pointsmemalign5 comments

Hi HN! I brought my favorite game from Palm OS to the web as a hobby project. In Space Trader, you can trade goods, hunt bounties, amass a fortune, buy a moon and retire.

One of the parts of this project I enjoyed the most:

To aid debugging and unit testing, I use a deterministic random number generator called GameRand. In debug mode, I can capture the random seed and log of every action taken in the game. Then I can replay that to reproduce a bug or create a test.

I ended up creating nearly exhaustive test coverage this way.

A write-up with more technical details and links to source code:

https://memalign.github.io/p/spacetrader.html

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I had not played it since it is not working on my computer, although if someone implement in uxn then it should be able to work on many computers. (However, although I have not tried it, I think that keyboard commands is a good idea, like is mentioned in other comments on here.)

Another text-based picture format is XPM2, and is one that I had used sometimes (I wrote a implementation of XPM in C, supporting encoding and decoding all three formats; other implementations I have seen have many limitations and bugs). PCEImage could be used as a simpler format in case you do not need all of the features of XPM (such a a monochrome palette and symbolic colours), although it would also be possible to use a subset of XPM2.

Just give me a way to auto-dismiss. The popup gets old fast. Let me hit Enter to dismiss it at least. Great game. Reminds me of Escape Velocity by Ambrosia.

Thanks for trying this out! I think I should add keyboard shortcuts in general to tailor this game to desktop.

Oh I love this style of gaming. Brings memories. Im almost at a million dollars, and I got a wasp lol

This is remarkably polished for a hobby project. Kudos.

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