3D engine made of MS Excel formulae

#1

Post by jbawgs » Fri, Feb 16, 2018, 6:57 PM UTC

3D engine made of MS Excel formulae
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Re: 3D engine made of MS Excel formulae

#2

Post by jasonallen » Fri, Feb 16, 2018, 8:21 PM UTC

As an excel developer in the 90's, this brings up great memories. I wrote the Doom Excel credits in Office 95. I wish I'd had thought of doing this instead. Kudos.

Re: 3D engine made of MS Excel formulae

#3

Post by keville » Fri, Feb 16, 2018, 8:32 PM UTC

jasonallen wrote: post #2

As an excel developer in the 90's, this brings up great memories. I wrote the Doom Excel credits in Office 95. I wish I'd had thought of doing this instead. Kudos.

(Sending some kudos your way, too, having lost many an hour to that Easter egg on otherwise-game-deprived school machines.)

Re: 3D engine made of MS Excel formulae

#4

Post by monocasa » Fri, Feb 16, 2018, 9:05 PM UTC

jasonallen wrote: post #2

As an excel developer in the 90's, this brings up great memories. I wrote the Doom Excel credits in Office 95. I wish I'd had thought of doing this instead. Kudos.

Do you think there's anyway that something like that could be shipped by Microsoft these days?

Re: 3D engine made of MS Excel formulae

#5

Post by nxc18 » Fri, Feb 16, 2018, 9:33 PM UTC

monocasa wrote: post #4

jasonallen wrote: post #2

As an excel developer in the 90's, this brings up great memories. I wrote the Doom Excel credits in Office 95. I wish I'd had thought of doing this instead. Kudos.

Do you think there's anyway that something like that could be shipped by Microsoft these days?

Not at MSFT but no. Easter Eggs aren’t worth the security risk of added code.

See ‘Trustworthy Computing’ initiative from the 2000s.

Re: 3D engine made of MS Excel formulae

#6

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC » Fri, Feb 16, 2018, 9:48 PM UTC

Spreadsheets in general and Excel in particular are magic. It is very likely that spreadsheets were the killer application that drove the demand for PC's by businesses.

Spreadsheets are truly the programming tool of the masses (who don't even necessarily think they are programming).

Re: 3D engine made of MS Excel formulae

#7

Post by Pulcinella » Fri, Feb 16, 2018, 10:17 PM UTC

I really like how the only VBA macros are for catching key inputs so you don’t have to manually update your location cell.

Most “look what this crazy person built in excel!” things end up really having VBA do all the work.

Re: 3D engine made of MS Excel formulae

#8

Post by jacquesm » Fri, Feb 16, 2018, 10:46 PM UTC

That's very neat. Another nice example of the power of excel and spreadsheets in general is the fast.ai course, almost all of the basics are covered in spreadsheets.

Re: 3D engine made of MS Excel formulae

#9

Post by cr0sh » Fri, Feb 16, 2018, 10:50 PM UTC

This is crazy. I'm pretty floored that someone did something like this.

Then again, we've all seen (or worse, have been roped into trying to convert!) some of the crazy Excel monstrosities some manager wrote that runs an entire company or such!

Prior to seeing this, I had found (somewhere - dunno if it still exists out there) a "tutorial" on how a neural network works - and the whole thing was done as an Excel worksheet. I thought that was pretty insane at the time...

Re: 3D engine made of MS Excel formulae

#10

Post by grizzles » Fri, Feb 16, 2018, 10:53 PM UTC

Since Excel is a pure functional programming paradigm, I suppose this will make FP people happy to see FP taken so far without mixing in any imperative constructs. It's the Übermensch of functional 3d engines.