DHTML Lemmings in JavaScript (2004) | Hacker News Reader

DHTML Lemmings in JavaScript (2004)

elizium.nu

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Cool :) I was there when he built this in the Dutch Gathering Of Tweakers /webdev forums back in the days.

Crisp made a nice writeup on the internal workings:

http://crisp.tweakblogs.net/blog/3881/dhtml-lemmings-primer....

Wow, long time I hadn't seen the DHTML buzzword.

I find amusing that being made in 2004 still works!

I made a couple canvas 2D games in Jan/Feb this year and I tried the HTML5 gamepad API in Chrome, and now (10 months after that) it is deprecated. My experience doing "complex" stuff with HTML and Javascript is that it won't last long. Now I wonder if I'm doing it wrong!

I'm sure you weren't doing it wrong, it's simply that the more adventurous HTML5 APIs were (and are) in some cases experimental and subject to change.

The rudiments of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript haven't changed much in the last decade, if you're only doing "simple" stuff - this game works with animated GIFs and moving said GIFs about with a little bit of JavaScript. You could self-evidently still do exactly the same thing today, if you wanted to, but one would probably be more likely to do it with the Canvas API, which wasn't available in 2004.

The real curiosity of this one for me is that it wasn't done in Flash back then!

Replying to myself, but: this makes it sound like creating Lemmings using the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript of 2004 ("DHTML", as we sometimes said back then) wasn't an impressive achievement in its own right - clearly it was.

Yeah, the only things guaranteed to stay are JS quirks.

> The real curiosity of this one for me is that it wasn't done in Flash back then!

Foresight! When we re-visit this on Hacker News in 2024, DHTML Lemmings will still work in the browser, and no one will even remember what Flash was ;)

A while back I woke up in the middle of the night wondering "How the heck did that guy do destructible terrain in the browser in 2004?!"... There was no pixel-level access available (besides XBM images, but they were black and white only). I had to get out of bed and find the game online. The answer turned out to be pretty clever! (Spoiler: http://www.mrspeaker.net/2013/04/23/dhtml-lemmings/)

The no-JS message is interesting:

Make sure you are running Microsoft Internet Explorer IE5.5 or higher, or any other recent DHTML-capable browser such as Netscape, Mozilla or Opera.

The idea of coding for browsers more than a decade old, with their own quirks, feels very demoscene-ish. We have JS demo competitions targeting the latest browser versions, but the C64 demoscene (and other old platforms) is still very lively, so maybe this is another unexplored niche with some fun possibilities...

I almost feel like getting a Win95 VM with IE5.5 to try it out.

IE5 was released in late 2000 (windows 2000, and office 2000 included it), IE6 was a year later iirc, so in 2004 it was probably still pretty relevant, given the number of dialup users who couldn't/wouldn't download all updates.

Well this is a blast from the past! I remember when this came out. At the time JS was mostly used for image rollovers and form validation, so this was an eye-opener for many developers.

I tried playing through this several years ago, and found that, due to a subtle difference in timing relative to the original game, one of the levels was impossible to beat.

Wasted hours on this back in the days. This is how I'll always remember the Lemmings theme.

Edit: I get no sound in Firefox. Any ideas?

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