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Comment by vunderba | Hacker News Reader

As somebody who grew up in the era of MS-DOS and QBASIC - it's pretty amusing to see two AI-assisted GORILLA.BAS web games in the past week.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48856350

Can also play the original as well online

https://classicreload.com/play/qbasic-gorillas.html

Feedback

- the wind/round text should NOT be placed over buildings because.... one of the buildings is gray thus making it almost impossible to read.

- I'd honestly get rid of the pseudo-CRT scanline filter - it looks grainy more than anything. For a better reference see https://github.com/gingerbeardman/webgl-crt-shader

- When implementing camera follow one thing you need is a sort of "grace window". Right now it's so tightly coupled to the movement of the banana it practically gives you whiplash.

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I don't know if the poster changed the filter after reading your comment, but the filter that is there now looks great to my eyes.

Nope, haven't changed it! I think it's an aesthetic preference thing.

I don't think they updated it - it still looks a very simplistic combination of slightly high frequency noise + artificial horz scanlines.

I grew up in the era, and a couple of my buddies still keep a few CRTs for playing NES games so its immediately apparent to me. Similar to when laymen use AI to generate "pixel art" without doing any grid alignment or palette reduction.

Retroarch also has some decent approximations of CRT scanline using shaders as well (see crt-geom crt-lottes)

https://www.retroarch.com/?page=shaders

I understand, I'm not going for accuracy, just suggestion. For someone like you it won't feel right, I totally get it.

Yeah and CRT emulation can be a pretty deep rabbit hole. The amount of work that goes into making things skeuomorphic is pretty wild.

If you want to see a neat example, check out cool-retro-term, it’s been around for a while but is still super impressive.

https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term

I've made two updates: the wind and round text should be more legible with a slightly transparent background under it. The camera is less whiplash-y and pauses for a moment after the banana hit if it's zoomed out and the zoom in is a bit slower.

I hadn’t seen the other one! I grew up with this as well.

I like the camera grace window idea. I’ve been pondering how to handle the post-hit zoom in.

Good call on the wind text. I like the filter (?). I’ll look at your link.

Thanks for the feedback!

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