Scythe Wielder
Newcomer
Today during my TA (Teacher's Aid) period, my teacher tells me she has nothing for me to do so I can just go into the school library for the whole period. So I'm browsing around, and in the hobbies section I find an ancient book called "Basic Adventure and Strategy Game Design for the TRS-80." I browsed through it for a while, and proceeded to check out the book which, had not only been sitting on the shelf since before I was born, but had never been checked out until now. It's almost surreal, seeing the due date stamp which says 2004 and the date inside the book which says 1984. All the same, though, the book has some pretty cool topics and info about adventure and strategy games. That information is timeless, even though it's written in TRS-80 BASIC. I'm gonna have a lot of fun reading through the chapters and converting everything to C++.
While I was in there I also found a really ancient book on graphics programming in BASIC (our school could benefit from some new programming books , aside from the AP Java textbook of course). I skimmed through it, but I knew pretty much everything it had to tell me so I passed it up. It was interesting to see that it actually had been checked out, though. If this were maybe five years ago and I was still using QBasic I would have enthusiastically eaten it up (I know, five years ago you were all on Windows 98 or 2000, but I'm not the wealthiest guy in the world so I took what I could get, which was an old 486-33 MHz at the time). It was a lot of fun, seeing the names of the young budding computer scientists from 1986 written on the checkout card.
It was also quite fun to see Menick's style of writing, and how it sounds a lot like that of a Premier press book that you'd buy today. It just goes to show you that even though the technology has evolved oh so much since this 20 year old book was written, the basic concepts of game design and computer graphics hasn't changed as much as we tend to think (to the point where I'm finding plenty of useful info in this book), and neither has the gamer/coder/geek culture in general. As I read Menick's words it felt almost as if he'd written them a month ago, rather than the same year my parents got married. Dunno why I'm going on about this, just rambling I guess. I just think it's cool that I found some usefulness in something that just appeared to be rotting on some random shelf, waiting for me to rescue it.
While I was in there I also found a really ancient book on graphics programming in BASIC (our school could benefit from some new programming books , aside from the AP Java textbook of course). I skimmed through it, but I knew pretty much everything it had to tell me so I passed it up. It was interesting to see that it actually had been checked out, though. If this were maybe five years ago and I was still using QBasic I would have enthusiastically eaten it up (I know, five years ago you were all on Windows 98 or 2000, but I'm not the wealthiest guy in the world so I took what I could get, which was an old 486-33 MHz at the time). It was a lot of fun, seeing the names of the young budding computer scientists from 1986 written on the checkout card.
It was also quite fun to see Menick's style of writing, and how it sounds a lot like that of a Premier press book that you'd buy today. It just goes to show you that even though the technology has evolved oh so much since this 20 year old book was written, the basic concepts of game design and computer graphics hasn't changed as much as we tend to think (to the point where I'm finding plenty of useful info in this book), and neither has the gamer/coder/geek culture in general. As I read Menick's words it felt almost as if he'd written them a month ago, rather than the same year my parents got married. Dunno why I'm going on about this, just rambling I guess. I just think it's cool that I found some usefulness in something that just appeared to be rotting on some random shelf, waiting for me to rescue it.
