I saw your codespank of Eliza and covered in my blog a few days ago. Great job.

-hartnell

I ended up filling a notebook up with handwritten basic code for a battle-tach style text based mech war simulator that I would take to my cousins house on the weekends and hack around on their Commodore 64.

Eventually I got my hands on an old out-dated IBM PC Monochrome green monitor, 2 5~” floppie drives..

once I set a ram drive to do my file swapping I was in heaven.

…

I have continued to code basic taking time off..

I have to agree with you. The development of exploring the code, trying things out, getting an idea and making it work, much more inspiring for me than copying something out of a book.

I wrote a pant program in QBasic, Several Text RPGs, a Roguelike battle simulator.. I have only one major half-finished project that I ported to FB.

The things I am working on now have taken me more than a year on and off and probably several more before I’m done. I do this because I love it.

Right now I am concurrently working on a game project that could be described as a Random RPG with elements of both Roguelike’s and Text-Adventure’s.

I like both of these types of games, MUD’s.. etc. I dislike the lack of randomness in the TA genre, and the lack of plot depth in the RL’s.

What I’m working on now is the Pasing engine. Once I get that done I want to merge my RL view with a TA interface and begin workin on the memory model for my mob AI. I want to have my mobs be smart enough to do anything the player can do, and be able to learn, make plans, and remember things and be able to talk with the player.

All this is a massive undertaking, and I don’t know if I’ll ever finish, but it sure is fun.

Happy coding!

What you *can* do is study the code, see how it’s put together, and make something similar and throw that out there.

That book you have is a collectable, and I envy you for having it. :)

-hartnell

Bravo.

The “Family Computing” code has vanished by these days though.

i don’t play a lot of games done in qb. i find them fascinating, but rdc’s upcoming game i am drooling over, and i’m going to play it if i can. i hope he doesn’t read this, but i’m trying very hard to collect any info / stories about how awesome (or friendly too) rdc in particular is. if you or anyone else could mail mystikshadows@ascii-world.com with them, great. this includes any info on his best projects in your opinion.

i like making apps and utils, most of them are very specific to my use, but i’ve made at least one or two that anyone could use.

i did learn allegro, and i started using it to work with 24bit 1024×768 graphics in fb, but the 24bit card i made for mother’s day in 2005 (i like making computer cards. they’re not as good as bluemountain but they’re fun.) didn’t work on any of her computers, or any computer i’ve run it on, except the best one i have. mind you, i only tried it on machines that do 1024×768 graphics routinely.

this compatibility issue is why i haven’t bothered with the huge dos paint program i wanted to make a year ago. but for smaller projects that are more fun, “basic base” at the ascii-world forums have tons of “snippets” like this one, usually more complex- i spent maybe 4 minutes on that one. like ascii art a lot, too. i’ve made some programs that let you animate it, one per someone else’s specs. (he wanted one that just loaded numbered .txt files)

BASIC is fun. it’s a useful tool, but it’s also a toy. that’s one of the things that’s great about it. i mean it’s great that we can make zelda clones now. lynn’s legacy really is amazing (imo) but to me, basic is a lot like a game itself, it’s my hobby.

rdc recently wrote some pattern generators that I really liked, you might like them too

http://www.freebasic.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5490