

DHTML Lemmings in JavaScript (2004) - ForHackernews
http://www.elizium.nu/scripts/lemmings/

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SchizoDuckie
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....](http://crisp.tweakblogs.net/blog/3881/dhtml-lemmings-primer.html)

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

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reidrac
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!

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bshimmin
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!

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bshimmin
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.

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mrspeaker
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/](http://www.mrspeaker.net/2013/04/23/dhtml-lemmings/))

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userbinator
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.

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tracker1
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.

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user24
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.

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doodpants
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.

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thisjepisje
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?

