

Using Microsoft Excel as a 3D Game Engine - hhm
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3563/microsoft_excel_revolutionary_3d_.php?print=1

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henning
Did you know that there are companies that use VBA, Microsoft Excel's
extension language, for floating point numerical computations, in real life,
not as a joke?

Did you know there are companies that make tens of thousands of dollars a year
off the results of these computations?

How do I know this? I WORK AT ONE, OH GOD _screams like Sam Kinison_

~~~
jey
Yeah, there's even a product out there that compiles an Excel spreadsheet into
optimized machine code, and apparently people do buy it.

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yters
I find the idea of non linear programming to be pretty interesting. I sort of
do this in Lisp, I program in terms of specific functions, but once I'm in the
function programming becomes linear. I can do this less effectively in object
oriented languages such as Java, since I have to write a whole class at a
time. Some might call non linear programming top down or bottom up
programming, but really it's about interest point based programming. Sometimes
the interest points are at the top or at the bottom, but more often they are
at some intermediary point in the complex tree or graph describing how your
program works.

So, a 2D layout like Excel offers much more freedom, but I wonder if sometimes
you'll want a 3rd dimension? And, if that's the case, is it possible to have a
programming space that supports an arbitrary N dimensions, or N-N dimensions,
ad infinitum?

~~~
iamwil
Sure, it's probably possible, as certain types of cellular automata are turing
complete. However, I've not seen anything more complex than a logic gate--no
one thinks it's practical.

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sanj
Back in the day, when I was working on handhelds, icons were always defined in
some nasty bit-fiddly binary format. Masking was similar hard.

I ended up building (?) an Excel spreadsheet to do it for me. In some ways, it
was almost the inverse of the technique in the link:

\- one set of cells was used to "draw" the icon by filling them with "X"s

\- another set of cells would glue together the values specified by each X
into appropriate 32-bit integer values

\- a final set (the coup de grace!) would grab those ints and bit twiddle them
directly into a short line of legitimate c code, ready to be copied into a
header file

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thingsilearned
Ha! But can it ray trace?

~~~
xirium
You can render fractals from a database (
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=130971> ) and stored procedure languages
are powerful enough to generate .tga files.

