Dhtml Lemmings (2004) | Hacker News Reader

Dhtml Lemmings (2004)

elizium.nu

65 pointstetris1116 comments

That is just a rehost, as I know the person who created that, a Dutch guy. The original is not hosted anymore due to Brein, a software IP/piracy agency.

https://crisp.home.xs4all.nl/lemmings/lemmings.html

I remember him, since he won a PHP contest of DownNOut (I finished second).

Another programmer had the same pseudo, but was working on the Atari ST.

Coming from an era of tiles and sprites, Lemmings was exciting because it had real destructible terrain. The game action happens in its pixel buffer, and every little speck of dirt can make a difference to how the characters behave.

When I saw this adaptation back in 2004, I was amazed because the web didn't even HAVE an API for its pixel buffer; the canvas element didn't arrive until a year later! All the destructible/buildable terrain here is faked out with stacked `img` elements. They had to simulate a simple form of graphics with a more complex one, because that's all the platform made available.

It's very good.

This post got me curious about how the term DHTML died so quickly. Apparently we hit peak DHTML in 2001, according to Google Ngram Viewer.

I’ve always remembered it as XHTML lemmings, didn’t know dhtml was a term at all!

Such an interesting bubble of time. JavaScript, CSS and the ability to modify the DOM… but no AJAX requests. I remember using iframes to load remote content. What a mess.

There wasn't much of a window where we had the ability to reliably dynamically update webpages without a way of getting data to do it. IE4 was the first browser that had a modern dynamic DOM with CSS support -- but it was all very rudimentary. IE5 came out a little more than a year later came with MSXML 2.0 which had the Microsoft.XMLHTTP ActiveX object that could be used within the browser; so it was really only like 14 months where we had DHTML without the ability to do XML HTTP requests.

And even then, you couldn't really make use of it unless you were in the enviable position of not having to maintain Netscape compatibility, because Netscape basically had no ability to alter a page after it was loaded outside of extremely specific exceptions like being able to replace one image with another image of exactly the same size. And through the weird and broken 'layers' concept they came up with to try to rush out a response to IE's iframes.

I remember discovering Microsoft.XMLHTTP in early 1999; probably within a month of IE5 coming out, and it really was like suddenly gaining a superpower. People (rightfully) gave Internet Explorer a whole lot of crap for getting to IE6 and then stagnating for years; but so much of what we consider to be the modern web today can trace its lineage directly to the ideas Microsoft brought to the browser in IE4 and IE5. They basically reinvented what the browser could be.

It still irks me when people call pages with JavaScript on "static", when they're clearly dynamic.

It's static from the perspective of the server. But agreed, it needs a different term.

Trip down memory lane, I just remembered the sadness I felt when I finished the level where you have to use blockers to guide the descent but when all the lemmings are saved, you have to self destruct the blockers to win.

And the relief when you reach the same level on a higher difficulty level but you have to save 100%...

... Which you can using various digging techniques that completely eluded you in the easy difficulty.

A 2014 version can be found here

https://github.com/trufae/fxos-app-lemmings

Also, there are:

* https://github.com/tomsoftware/Lemmings.ts

* https://lldb.camanis.net/level/play/473/1/Just-dig

No music? :-(

PC version: <https://www.paula8364.com/socse/index.php?field=audiolink&so...>

Amiga: <https://www.paula8364.com/socse/index.php?field=audiolink&so...>

Oh hell yeah. Totally my jams.

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