Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fixing a Bug in an 18 Year Old Shockwave Game

mattbruv.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 20 posts

Re: Fixing a Bug in an 18 Year Old Shockwave Game

#11

Post by andrepd »

codetrotter wrote: post #6
hnzix wrote: post #3

Shockwave was generated by Macromedia Director (the spiritual precursor to Flash) and had a lovely IDE with a fantastic debugger and excellent 3D, video and audio support. You could make "proper" games in it, I once hooked it up to some hardware tilt sensors to make a Joust clone you could play by flapping your arms. The scripting language Lingo was a little bit gumby but perfectly serviceable. The main engine limita…

Macromedia Flash and Macromedia Director were both powerful and interesting products. I played around with Flash years ago, back when Flash was still “in vogue” — made a couple of animations and wrote a rudimentary graphics editor that I didn’t finish. I have fond memories of playing Flash and Shockwave games in elementary and middle school. One Shockwave game in particular that I remember was a 3d car game where oth…

>One Shockwave game in particular that I remember was a 3d car game where other cars were chasing you through a city.

On The Run. It too was a staple of my many hours spent playing flash and shockwave games.

Re: Fixing a Bug in an 18 Year Old Shockwave Game

#12

Post by ppseafield »

hnzix wrote: post #3

Shockwave was generated by Macromedia Director (the spiritual precursor to Flash) and had a lovely IDE with a fantastic debugger and excellent 3D, video and audio support. You could make "proper" games in it, I once hooked it up to some hardware tilt sensors to make a Joust clone you could play by flapping your arms. The scripting language Lingo was a little bit gumby but perfectly serviceable. The main engine limita…

This was my first experience with programming at 13! I remember being mystified by the first example in my book:

    on mouseup me
        go to the frame
    end

Re: Fixing a Bug in an 18 Year Old Shockwave Game

#13

Post by notjustanymike »

One of my concentrations in college was Multimedia Programming in Shockwave. I build a 3D, multiplayer version of Spy Vs. Spy with randomly generated levels.

The host would generate a 2D array of objects and locations and then transmit to the client. I felt so smart back then.

The 3D engine was pretty easy to work with. I hand-coded and hard-coded every single animation, since it was faster than learning how to animate.

I miss working with Shockwave, it provided a wonderful combination of power and accessibility. I've found Unity to be the closest in features, but don't get the same thrill from it.

Ah college.

Re: Fixing a Bug in an 18 Year Old Shockwave Game

#14

Post by codetrotter »

andrepd wrote: post #11
codetrotter wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Macromedia Flash and Macromedia Director were both powerful and interesting products. I played around with Flash years ago, back when Flash was still “in vogue” — made a couple of animations and wrote a rudimentary graphics editor that I didn’t finish. I have fond memories of playing Flash and Shockwave games in elementary and middle school. One Shockwave game in particular that I remember was a 3d car game where oth…

>One Shockwave game in particular that I remember was a 3d car game where other cars were chasing you through a city. On The Run. It too was a staple of my many hours spent playing flash and shockwave games.

Yup that’s the one :)

Re: Fixing a Bug in an 18 Year Old Shockwave Game

#15

Post by Keyframe »

hnzix wrote: post #3

Shockwave was generated by Macromedia Director (the spiritual precursor to Flash) and had a lovely IDE with a fantastic debugger and excellent 3D, video and audio support. You could make "proper" games in it, I once hooked it up to some hardware tilt sensors to make a Joust clone you could play by flapping your arms. The scripting language Lingo was a little bit gumby but perfectly serviceable. The main engine limita…

Director was peak interactive CD. We used it exclusively for that.

Re: Fixing a Bug in an 18 Year Old Shockwave Game

#17

Post by donatj »

hnzix wrote: post #7
codetrotter wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Macromedia Flash and Macromedia Director were both powerful and interesting products. I played around with Flash years ago, back when Flash was still “in vogue” — made a couple of animations and wrote a rudimentary graphics editor that I didn’t finish. I have fond memories of playing Flash and Shockwave games in elementary and middle school. One Shockwave game in particular that I remember was a 3d car game where oth…

Director had depth and power, while Flash was very accessible to illustrator/designer types. That era saw some amazing net.art demoscene type pieces that have no modern equivalent (Joshua Davis / flight404 etc). Haiku.ai is doing some interesting work in that space. I wonder if WebAssembly can bring back this classic art aesthetic. The key is a great IDE with strong graphics asset management.

I’ve wondered recently if it would be possible to convert flash or shockwave to WASM and preserve some of these old relics.

Re: Fixing a Bug in an 18 Year Old Shockwave Game

#18

Post by daddydonkey »

hnzix wrote: post #3

Shockwave was generated by Macromedia Director (the spiritual precursor to Flash) and had a lovely IDE with a fantastic debugger and excellent 3D, video and audio support. You could make "proper" games in it, I once hooked it up to some hardware tilt sensors to make a Joust clone you could play by flapping your arms. The scripting language Lingo was a little bit gumby but perfectly serviceable. The main engine limita…

"Fixing a bug in the game by literally editing 1 byte" Could have been less. He chose "fessage", which was a 3 bit change but "lessage" is is just 1.

Re: Fixing a Bug in an 18 Year Old Shockwave Game

#19

Post by giancarlostoro »

donatj wrote: post #17
hnzix wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Director had depth and power, while Flash was very accessible to illustrator/designer types. That era saw some amazing net.art demoscene type pieces that have no modern equivalent (Joshua Davis / flight404 etc). Haiku.ai is doing some interesting work in that space. I wonder if WebAssembly can bring back this classic art aesthetic. The key is a great IDE with strong graphics asset management.

I’ve wondered recently if it would be possible to convert flash or shockwave to WASM and preserve some of these old relics.

That's one of the goals in a discord I'm a part of. The concern is whether or not WebSockets is adequate enough for this too. There will likely be a need for JavaScript in any regard. It's interesting that Director did support JS in some form for a while too, but everyone always writes the decompilers for the Lingo syntax.
Post reply on HN