I know how to flesh this out into a game: Have the setting be a high school computer lab, and have the player see how much Commander Keen or Prince of Persia they can play without the teacher catching them.
Funny. At my HS there was also a game where you'd hang out in the drafting lab during lunch, and try to eat your lunch food while playing Wolfenstein 3D, without the teacher noticing the food part.
Crumbs on the digitizer board were especially dangerous to your wellbeing.
Ours was Spectre[0] as our school had a Macintosh lab. We learned to pick locks on that lab door, to sneak in and play the game together during lunch. Thankfully the lab teacher was an extremely passionate nerd like us, so was understanding, but it still involved a fair few lunchtime detentions over the year or two we did it.
Oh damn, Janus VR is still ongoing - Once I tried to make an coding environment with it, using browser based IDEs, but could not make anything happen properly :/
I'm actually working on VR environment that is fully self-modifying. Currently building code editor and hot-swapping environment. It uses Lua and LOVR engine as a host.
It is a step away from a classic concept of engine/lib/framework, the stable blackbox with API you call into. It's more like code environment you can examine, extend and reload instantaneously, with some built-in safeguards for reverting code errors. I'll make a ShowHN when I get to something substantial.
I just ran into actual Smalltalk-in-VR project called PharoVRIDE. I wish I had time and skills to recreate Smalltalk's VM images. I still haven't thought out how persistence would work.
Super, I would love to see this as we already in the early stages of building something similar but ours is pretty crappy UI. Making it slick is the hard part
Slick is a moving target susceptible to hedonistic adaption - crappy UI but functional is better than non-existent, I’d say release as soon as you can ...
Yeah we have released already, and actually got front page of Hacker News for 2 days, so got a lot of great feedback. You can check it out here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21734845
One could modify this to use a PC emulator like PCjs [1] and then run real DOS under it, and then really format your virtual C drive. (FreeDOS or MS-DOS 2.x could be run entirely legally; running newer versions of MS-DOS might not technically be legal but I doubt Microsoft would do anything about it.)
My first thought is to package up the game hardware in a Compaq 386 style case, complete with diskette drives that the VR-DOS emulator reads. Get a time machine, take it back and have someone put on the headset and insert their favourite software into the physical/virtual PC.
I never actually got to the VR part because there has been no real interest/participation with what I made so far, but as far as the 3D environment (plus scripting) I made VSIM (vintagesimulator.com) which is a little along these lines and the aim was to do VR eventually. But hardly anyone ever used it so I moved on.
Ha! Soon games will have computers inside where you can program games in those, that will have computers inside where you can program games in those...ad infinitum.
I wonder if our Universe is not such a game actually.
Oh my god. I never imagined this even in my dreams that something like this can be made. I am a VR developer and I am really astounded by the effort you would've put in this. Amazing job.
