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shakna 3 hours ago [-]
I've been playing around with SmallBASIC [0], which also comes with raylib, but also nuklear.
BASIC as a game design language does feel like some of the common game abstractions like the draw and tick loops, are really well suited to it. And offloading the math-heavy things like raycasting to C and importing does give you a nice abstraction layer.
I used to love posts like this. I even wrote my own basic runtime environment back in the day. But lately, because of AI, I've completely lost interest in this kind of stuff.
I don't say that lightly. I've been coding since I was 11 and loved every minute of it. I'm 52 now, and once I fully gave in to using AI, I pretty much stopped writing code myself.
Has anyone else felt like they've lost that spark?
whateveracct 26 minutes ago [-]
1. Nobody is forcing you to use AI. You can build cool stuff slower by hand. There are benefits, even. You can just..stop
2. This is full of "co-authored with cursoragent" so this is ..not (1) lol so who cares
prologic 22 minutes ago [-]
Not really. Like you I also started coding in BASIC at an early age, though I'm 10 years behind you in "age" but probably 10 years ahead of you, only because I grew up in a 3rd-world country where we ourselves were behind the rest of the 1st/2nd nations
That being said however, no, i don't feel like I've lost the "spark" at all. Sure, I no longer care that much about the "writing of the code" itself, but you just end up shifting your focus to the creative side of thigns, content creating and driving.
That's still interesting. AI can't (yet?) replace this.
dabbz 5 hours ago [-]
This reminds me immensely of DARK Basic built by The Game Creators. It was how I got my start into programming back in the day.
klik99 2 hours ago [-]
Very cool - I made my first game in BASIC over 25 years ago and now I'm still making games - I've been looking for a good BASIC to help teach my kids programming because pygame, scratch, roblox lua, all have unique issues that make it either too overwhelming or smooth over the important bits too much to be really useful. Hopefully this will be it - if there are good examples or can port old BASIC games to it.
frenzcan 5 hours ago [-]
I kind of like the uppercase keywords of older programming languages, it makes the non-code parts standout more, probably even more important before syntax highlighting became common
monster_truck 7 hours ago [-]
This is neat! I know it's not really the point but I would like to see some shallow benchmarks, I'm curious what perf (if any) is lost building like this.
My very first apps were written in LibertyBASIC, almost 30 years ago. I learned how to pirate things because the borland compiler required to share my creations with my friends was $299, which was a lot of money back then.
wunderwuzzi23 6 hours ago [-]
Nice. A BASIC for game development takes me back to AMOS on the Commodore Amiga.
Ditto the ST equivalent STOS. Amiga owning friends preferred Blitz BASIC though. Unfortunately, due to one Dijkstra quote about it, people tend to be quite snobbish about BASIC.
binaryturtle 3 hours ago [-]
BlitzBasic(2) was also great. Hacked together bunch of games with it. Huge fun.
ColinEberhardt 6 hours ago [-]
Oh wow, I loved AMOS - it is what got me seriously into programming in the first place.
stuaxo 4 hours ago [-]
Nice, this might be good for my 9 year old.
As a Python dev, there are a million things I can show her in Python and that huge amount of choice is an issue in itself sometimes.
BASIC as a game design language does feel like some of the common game abstractions like the draw and tick loops, are really well suited to it. And offloading the math-heavy things like raycasting to C and importing does give you a nice abstraction layer.
[0] https://smallbasic.github.io/
I don't say that lightly. I've been coding since I was 11 and loved every minute of it. I'm 52 now, and once I fully gave in to using AI, I pretty much stopped writing code myself.
Has anyone else felt like they've lost that spark?
2. This is full of "co-authored with cursoragent" so this is ..not (1) lol so who cares
That being said however, no, i don't feel like I've lost the "spark" at all. Sure, I no longer care that much about the "writing of the code" itself, but you just end up shifting your focus to the creative side of thigns, content creating and driving.
That's still interesting. AI can't (yet?) replace this.
My very first apps were written in LibertyBASIC, almost 30 years ago. I learned how to pirate things because the borland compiler required to share my creations with my friends was $299, which was a lot of money back then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMOS_(programming_language)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STOS_BASIC
There's a modernised build:
https://atariscne.org/news/index.php/stos-basic-v5-5-alpha-t...
And a modern descendant, AOZ Studio:
https://www.aoz.studio/
As a Python dev, there are a million things I can show her in Python and that huge amount of choice is an issue in itself sometimes.
> CharmingBlaze and cursoragent committed
oh..
[0] https://itch.io/post/1020410