(no subject)

[unbibium]

Someone decided to undertake the ambitious project of designing a shoot-em-up called Project Von Neumann based on evolutionary artificial life theory. Unfortunately, the project looks to be seven years old, with no word as to whether or when development was discontinued. And besides which, there's no shortage of games that use AI of one sort or another, though it's a rare one that actually uses good AI. Black and White comes to mind, as does Creatures and, of course, The Sims. But not many space shooters.

I found Project Von Neumann while searching for an online copy of Dewdney's Scientific American article on biomorphs. It makes me wonder what other obscure computer science oddities might have an unclaimed place in mainstream games.

Another Dewdney article detailed a program written by Rich Gold. Gold wrote a game called "Little Computer People" in the 80's for Activision. It's like a primitive "The Sims" in 2D with just one character and his pet, and you can't decorate. The program Dewdney describes is called "Party Planner" and is a simple simulation where little ASCII characters have a specific idea about how far they want to be from other ASCII characters, and thus chase or run from each other appropriately. The simulation, while more similar to the Sims, isn't as fun to watch as I had hoped while programming it.

There are many Commodore 64 demos which create all kinds of strange hackish effects that one never saw in games for that platform. Though there was Rescue on Fractalus, a flight sim that seemed to have no trouble creating realistic landscapes by means hinted at by the title.

Comments

[pootrootbeer.livejournal.com]

I LOVED "Little Computer People".

I would make him use the toilet over and over and over again.

->flussssh<-

[schwa242.livejournal.com]

Another Dewdney article detailed a program written by Rich Gold. Gold wrote a game called "Little Computer People" in the 80's for Activision. It's like a primitive "The Sims" in 2D with just one character and his pet, and you can't decorate.

A review of this game in "ENTER" magazine (the only CTW magazine not based off a PBS series at the time) and it inspired my sixth grade science fair project. It was a program to simulate what my little eleven-year-old mind thought would be a digital character with a personality on my Timex Sinclair 2068. It appeared as a little furball thing in their magical 8x8 programmable sprite format that lived in a four story house. He had a TV, kitchen, bed, shower, bookshelf, and not much else. I used variables to calculate how tired, angry, happy, sad, etc. he was, though it was pretty dumb, as all he had to interact with was his few meager possessions. The level of quality was comparable to programming the Sims to fit on a Tamagotchi key-chain. At any rate, I got reserve grand champion at my school (second place out of the whole school essentially) and in the second place tier for the district. It took about four months to write the damn thing in BASIC, 50% of the coding taking place in the last two weeks before the fair, and I don't think I have ever taken that much time to write a program since.

Dewdney describes is called "Party Planner" and is a simple simulation where little ASCII characters have a specific idea about how far they want to be from other ASCII characters, and thus chase or run from each other appropriately. The simulation, while more similar to the Sims, isn't as fun to watch as I had hoped while programming it.

I used to enjoy Dewdney's computer-specific articles in Scientific American which my dad would get when I was in my early teens. Then, he shifted over to math I think, with occasional computer items to show various mathematical formulas or models or whatever, until the computer-related topics (and, I think Dewdney, but I could be wrong) disappeared from Scientific American altogether.

-- Schwa ---

Re:

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

I wish I'd read the Dewdney articles when I was young and they were first published. Then I'd have grown up to be l33t.

Re:

[schwa242.livejournal.com]

I read a few, but I don't think I grew up l33t.

-- Schwa ---

Re:

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

Well, I might have gotten into assembly language earlier and maybe squeezed out a demo before losing the c64.