everything samwyse knows / interactive

I can hear most of you asking already, “What’s a skyplane?” It is one of the three common ways to draw the sky in a computer image. The problem is that the sky is a hemisphere, which is round, while computer images are rectangular, and flat. Placing a flat rectangular picture on a round sphere requires streching the picture, and there are several ways to do that.

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Let me start by saying that, IMHO, Hydro Thunder is one of the all-time great arcade games. Even though it’s over seven years old (I believe it came out in 1998 or ‘99), I still love playing whenever I can find it. Unfortunately, that seems to be getting harder and harder to do, so frequently I have to make do with Arctic Thunder, which is in some ways even better.

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New authors frequently don’t fully understand the difference between classes and objects. Don’t take offense, it is a common problem with which new authors often struggle. I don’t think that it is Inform specific, either; you need to understand the same concepts to use TADS’ mechanisms, or if you want to becom a professional C++ or Java programmer. (more…)

Good games teach you the set of commands that you need to play the game. Almost every IF game extends the “standard” grammar in some way or another. This makes it easy to fall into a “guess the verb” puzzle. The trick to to remember Chekov’s gun and apply it in reverse. If you are going to use the verb “transmorgrify” in the third act, you need to introduce it in the first. (more…)