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Show HN: Space Trader (Ported from Palm OS to Vanilla JavaScript and HTML)

8 points by memalign 2y ago

Hi HN! I brought my favorite game from Palm OS to the web as a hobby project. In Space Trader, you can trade goods, hunt bounties, amass a fortune, buy a moon and retire. One of the parts of this project I enjoyed the most: To aid debugging and unit testing, I use a deterministic random number generator called GameRand. In debug mode, I can capture the random seed and log of every action taken in the game. Then I can replay that to reproduce a bug or create a test. I ended up creating nearly exhaustive test coverage this way. A write-up with more technical details and links to source code: https://memalign.github.io/p/spacetrader.html https://memalign.github.io/p/spacetrader.html

skibz 2y ago
This is remarkably polished for a hobby project. Kudos.
bobrobpr 2y ago
Just give me a way to auto-dismiss. The popup gets old fast. Let me hit Enter to dismiss it at least. Great game. Reminds me of Escape Velocity by Ambrosia.
- memalign 2y ago
  Thanks for trying this out! I think I should add keyboard shortcuts in general to tailor this game to desktop.
  - bobrobpr 2y ago
    Oh I love this style of gaming. Brings memories. Im almost at a million dollars, and I got a wasp lol
zzo38computer 2y ago
I had not played it since it is not working on my computer, although if someone implement in uxn then it should be able to work on many computers. (However, although I have not tried it, I think that keyboard commands is a good idea, like is mentioned in other comments on here.) Another text-based picture format is XPM2, and is one that I had used sometimes (I wrote a implementation of XPM in C, supporting encoding and decoding all three formats; other implementations I have seen have many limitations and bugs). PCEImage could be used as a simpler format in case you do not need all of the features of XPM (such a a monochrome palette and symbolic colours), although it would also be possible to use a subset of XPM2.
cannibalXxx 2y ago
[flagged]

8 points by memalign 2y ago

skibz 2y ago

This is remarkably polished for a hobby project. Kudos.

bobrobpr 2y ago

Just give me a way to auto-dismiss. The popup gets old fast. Let me hit Enter to dismiss it at least. Great game. Reminds me of Escape Velocity by Ambrosia.

memalign 2y ago
Thanks for trying this out! I think I should add keyboard shortcuts in general to tailor this game to desktop.
- bobrobpr 2y ago
  Oh I love this style of gaming. Brings memories. Im almost at a million dollars, and I got a wasp lol

zzo38computer 2y ago

I had not played it since it is not working on my computer, although if someone implement in uxn then it should be able to work on many computers. (However, although I have not tried it, I think that keyboard commands is a good idea, like is mentioned in other comments on here.) Another text-based picture format is XPM2, and is one that I had used sometimes (I wrote a implementation of XPM in C, supporting encoding and decoding all three formats; other implementations I have seen have many limitations and bugs). PCEImage could be used as a simpler format in case you do not need all of the features of XPM (such a a monochrome palette and symbolic colours), although it would also be possible to use a subset of XPM2.

cannibalXxx 2y ago

[flagged]