bananaboy

I have written many old school plasmas and that does look pretty good to me. Here's one I wrote that looks quite similar https://youtu.be/oX-cepvvQds?t=50 You don't do it once per row or column, and you don't call sine/cosine at all except at init time. You generate lookup tables for cosine, and for each pixel of a (typically mode 13h VGA) 320x200 screen you step through the tables with several counters at different rates and sum the values.

Here's someone else writing one that also uses that technique https://youtu.be/X6BpW2N_Sf0

There is an even more oldschool version which was done on XT/286 class machines which was just palette cycling, which didn't look quite as dynamic.

Gross. I think there’s been a large overcorrection to stem away from the arts. Certainly I’ve seen that in Australia when looking at schools for my sons.

Thank you for this

Same! Their radio show is an incredible piece of art!

The art was outsourced to pretty much one artist. Zach and Tarn implemented it.

There is a more recently maintained fork here https://github.com/sobitcorp/metapad

For a long time I used metapad as a notepad replacement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metapad (I even renamed the exe to notepad). Very fast and minimal.

Woah that’s cool! I love the case!

I love the Watcom C inline assembler. I use it frequently in my retro projects!

Haha that was the case at my uni too. I met my (ex) girlfriend on the unix system at uni through `talk` and `to` [1]. A lot of the CS students (me included) had .plans that we would update regularly as sort of proto-blogs. Definitely a lot of finger stalking (and `flon` [1] stalking as well).

[1] https://mewburn.net/luke/software.html

Omg yes, I found this borderline unreadable. So dense with clever phrases that say almost nothing. I came here to this thread to see if it was just me; I'm glad it wasn't!

Same here, I played a lot of LORD! Only a little bit of BRE. Incidentally the author of LORD Seth Robinson continues making games long after LORD. I think he’s semiretired now but he has been working on an ai-coded photoshop clone https://github.com/SethRobinson/Patchy

Haha I've been there!

I was just browsing a few of your past comments and see you were in gamedev in Melbourne. Maybe we've crossed paths - I was at Blue Tongue until we were shut down by THQ, then Tantalus for a year or two, then freelance for a while, and the last seven years I've been at Sledgehammer Games Melbourne.

Yeah I remember when Hot Coffee happened I was working at a studio owned by THQ and a message came down from the executive level basically warning us not to put in anything hidden like that. All secrets had to be disclosed and known by the executive team. Something like that anyway.

Same here! Very fond memories. I used Turbo Pascal 3.3 under CP/M on the Microbee but found it a bit hard and cumbersome to use. But when I discovered TP5 on MS-DOS I was blown away! This was coming from writing BASIC and batch files.

Years ago I worked with Mark Feldman who put together PC-GPE! I did a bit of a double take and fanboyed a bit when he started because I had spent so much time reading it.

I read the denthor tutorials back in the day! So good! I think I used to get them via email on a bbs that had an internet gateway. It was all very clunky, just a terminal account, I think it didn’t even have slirp

I’ve been working in the games industry as a programmer for 21 years and I’ve seen this so many times. I also used to see it on gamedev.net and flipcode.com. Very technical people, engine programmers, think they can make a game and seem to think that all it takes is an engine and don’t even think about the game part. They tinker endlessly with file formats, memory allocators, vector math libraries, pooled string classes, etc and never finish anything when they could have just used json and png files and actually shipped something. On PC for the scale of game most indie developers will make all of that stuff isn’t really necessary. And if you find it is necessary then you can refactor later.

The creator Andy Davidson has been posting some more fun stuff about worms over on X https://x.com/totalwormage/status/2087263286962094258

Same - I always preferred the pixel art look to the smooth cartoony look!

Very nice! I bought a Gigatron six years ago just after Marcel (one of the original developers) passed away. I think it was one of the last kits that Walter (the other developer) shipped out before running out of stock. It came with the wooden case with clear perspex top. I see that there are a few places that you can still buy one which is great! Embarrassingly I have yet to put mine together!

WinWord 2 or maybe 6 had everything I ever needed.

The author, Amit Patel, wrote the BBS door game Solar Realms Elite! His brother went on to write Baron Realms Elite.

Hey very nice! I made a 386+VGA Solitaire game a while back for a game jam https://horsedrawngames.itch.io/solitaire I always meant to go back and optimise it more because it shouldn’t require a Pentium!

This was started quite a few years ago

Steam does this for installation with machines on the local network! It will discover them and get the data from those machines instead of downloading from the wider internet. I’m not sure if it works for updates but it might!

Just in case you only read the headline and were confused, this is libVLC which underpins the VLC player.

“He’s not the messiah! He’s a very naughty boy!” This scene (and much of the rest of the movie) is seared in my brain. I love it so much!

Sorry my bad and I can’t edit it! Maybe dang will see it and fix it.

Whoops typo in the title there! It should of course be “pikuma”