TI Wars

[Willsy]

I'm not sure if Lucien posted this to AA or not... I certainly didn't see it...

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EtfsyyBdXA

 

Really nice! Is it ready to release and play?

[+RXB]

Very cool, what is the game about and what are you doing? It is like TOD or RISK or what?

[+save2600]

Very cool, what is the game about and what are you doing? It is like TOD or RISK or what?

...maybe a little like Utopia too? Looks great!

[lucien2]

Here's the thread: TI-Wars

 

I didn't touch it since end of May, but it's not abandoned.

 

Thanks for trying to motivate me.

[matthew180]

Very nice looking! I can't believe you did all that in that crazy polish notation of Forth! I never could get used to reading and writing everything backwards. The game interface is NICE! I love that you use a drop-down (with shadow) context menu to make selections instead of the "standard" (and stupid) text like:

 

Press:

A - Attack

M - Move

 

Or the even worse "TI way" of using the function keys: Press PROC'D to continue... ugh, spare me.

 

The game looks pretty slick too, I going to have to go read the thread. Any idea when you might get back to working on this?

[idflyfish]

WOW! Looks great.

[lucien2]

Any idea when you might get back to working on this?

 

 

I can't say I don't have enough free time, I broke my shoulder three weeks ago on bicycle.

[Willsy]

Any idea when you might get back to working on this?

 

 

I can't say I don't have enough free time, I broke my shoulder three weeks ago on bicycle.

 

Pah! You have TWO shoulders. That means you still have one spare shoulder! GET TO WORK!

[Willsy]

Very nice looking! I can't believe you did all that in that crazy polish notation of Forth!

 

It's easy when you get used to it! It's the simplicity of it (when the penny finally drops!) that will blow your mind!

 

Mark

[matthew180]

So is eating glass (easy once you get used to it)... You have the longevity of the language on your side, but it just seems too error prone to me. I guess I don't want to have to "get used to" a language, I want it to be natural from the start; let the compiler deal with making it good for the machine.

 

If I remember correctly from my reading, Forth was designed with two main design goals: 1. easy to parse, 2. easy to port. It does both of those wonderfully, but you sacrifice readability. Somewhere I read about a classic "the rocket crashed" because of the way Forth parsed a DO loop that had a floating point number. Hmm... Maybe it was Fortran. I can't remember now. :-(

 

I think what you have done is awesome! But I don't know if I could learn it.

Edited July 27, 2011 by matthew180

[+RXB]

Forth is my second faviorite language. I have promoted it over C for years. The problem with C is the libarary gets used by everyone and never debugged.

 

An example is the OS's we use today have huge holes in them and are the result of the libarary that were never debugged so patches are used to fix the holes.

 

Patch, after patch after patch. Then rewrite a upgrade, patch patch......

 

Forth is a bottom up language, so if used to a create a OS would naturally have less holes in it to exploit. Ah but Forth is really tough to learn compared to C and to debug requires a much better programmer.

 

I had hopes that someone would have made Forth more like LISP and created a more AI programming environment so it would be easier to make a OS and maintain it. But that never happened.

 

I still have high hopes for LISP or something like it as C has really run it's course as a language for future processors with multiple CPU and devices. Many new languages are on the radar for this.

 

IBM new zOS, Microsoft Singularity, TUNES, and new versions of LISP like or ADA like languages.

Edited July 27, 2011 by RXB

[insomnia]

Ah, man you're gonna make me cry over here.

 

I'd suggest that one could make buggy, hole-ridden code in any language. And in my experience, most crappy code is born of lazy or rushed programmers. It's so much simpler and faster to slap on a band-aid than to comprehensively understand how every line of code works. This is especially true for larger projects (operating systems come to mind). In general, testing effort and risk for bugs rise exponentially with code size. This would be true for any language.

 

OK, if I'm being fair, C does have a higher bugs-per-KLOC ratio than many other languages, but I think that's a reasonable trade for the flexibility it provides. I wouldn't count on any language to magically make programming simple and foolproof. The design of any language involves compromises.

 

That being said, Forth is pretty cool, and it's amazing how much functionality you can get out of such a simple idea. I would honestly love to see an operating system written in Forth.

 

Writing a game of this complexity is pretty darn impressive too. Tons of talent and dedication are required to pull something like that off.

[+RXB]

Forth would work, but I have been hoping for what I saw in computer Science many years ago that Microsoft and Apple were both talking about but never came to be.

 

The were talking about AI programs that wrote programs for you. The idea is valid the problem at the time was memory and CPU speed.

 

Today we do not have that problem, but I think the project was hijacked by the military and any work on it today is suppressed.

 

Like anything that has a hidden use or application any honest work in that field will be crushed.

 

Cloud would be perfect for this but not one person has suggested it.

Edited July 28, 2011 by RXB