
Elite trade engine in C - shawndumas
http://www.iancgbell.clara.net/elite/text/index.htm
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follower
Note that this is the site of Ian Bell, co-creator of the original Elite game:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Bell_(programmer)>

Really good video "postmortem" of the game by the other co-creator:
<http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014628/Classic-Game-Postmortem>

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kylemaxwell
Worth reviewing now that so many hackers are getting into 0x10c (largely based
on the same game).

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mkramlich
When I first saw Notch's page about 0x10c, my takeaway was, "This guy is going
to try making a cross between Elite and Minecraft."

And I squealed like a little girl. Because I've wanted a game like that for a
long time, and have even made a few game prototypes of my own in that feature
space.

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Natsu
Yeah. I think this will end up being a great way to teach kids an assembly
language. Usually, you end up doing lame assembly projects like lighting a few
diodes or dispensing change from an imaginary vending machine.

When I learned assembly, the class had us typing our programs into a Vax
computer older than I am and watching everything execute in a debugger and
doing page after page after page of hex math by hand, or writing out the
actual hex values for our programs by hand. To this day, I remember that
0x20FE is the shortest infinite loop. Every byte wasted lowered your grade.
That was all very educational, but not the least bit fun. The best part was at
the very end of the class where I learned a bunch of cool tricks from reading
the professor's solutions. He wouldn't show us _any_ of them until the whole
course was over.

With the DCPU, your programs might help you destroy enemy space ships, mine
and scan for resources, or even hack enemy computers. It could become almost
like the demo scene of old and knowing Notch, it will be waaaaaaay more fun
than learning assembly usually is.

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warmwaffles
What I can't wait for is someone to make a higher level language that will
compile down to DCPU

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X-Istence
There is an LLVM backend and clang can use it.

That means C/C++ code can be written and compiled down to DCPU16. You could
even write your own programming language (like BASIC) and have it compile down
to DCPU16.

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donpdonp
For those, such as myself, who have not seen Elite before. Here is a youtube
vid of some gameplay.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuvbZpH1QuE>

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mkramlich
Good to see this. I've been building computer games for decades and one hack I
learned early was that it was much easier to make a game with only a text-
based interface, whether CLI/REPL or curses-like. (Like my Rogue-like, Dead By
Zombie.) It puts constraints on what kinds of UI features you can have, and it
puts a ceiling on how visually beautiful you can make it. But it does allow
you to knock out features at a higher velocity. A much higher percentage of
your work is spent on the core game engine and game mechanics, with only a
thin slice spent on the UI layer.

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optymizer
would you please change that background? I stopped reading after 5 words. I
need my eyes, you know?

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statictype
I like seeing these kinds of pages once in a while. Makes me nostalgic over
the early days of the Internet, though it's missing a javascript popup asking
for your name followed by an alert greeting you by name to the site.

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kruhft
txtelite port compilable on unix : gcc -o txtelite txtelite.c -lm

<https://gist.github.com/2347664>

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villagefool
didn't those guys hear about Github ;)

