I didn't know quite what the headline meant - there was at least one TRON arcade game - as in, a coin-operated game - that had a totally different concept and which is now mostly deservedly forgotten:
I see from Google that indeed many, many people refer to this "use moving wall to make the other guy crash" style of game as "TRON" now, but TRON actually just put a brand name on a game genre that had been around:
"Snake" to TRON could actually be one of the earliest, if not the earliest, example of a big-budget studio movie adapting a video game concept. Doing so surprisingly directly.
Now, of course, half the movies that come out of Hollywood seem to have action bits that are vaguely video-game inspired.
I actually thought Snake and TRON were two distinct games with Snake being a 'player against environment'-game and TRON being 'player against an NPC'-game.
The TRON/Lightcycle genre is at its very best as a PvP(xN) game. Haven't logged in for years, but there used to be dozens of very active servers running Armagetron Advanced, and it looks like it's still going:
Discs of TRON was originally intended to be a fifth mode in the original Bally/Midway TRON, but was left out because of a couple of reasons. Some say there wasn't time to finish the mode, some thought the mode was fun enough to break out into it's own title.
And it does not deserve to be forgotten. Playing Discs of TRON in the "environmental" cabinet with stereo sound is a nice experience.
Anyway, here's some fun background on the TRON game, including some original design documents:
An arcade nearish to me had the environmental cabinet, complete with it's customer controller hardware.
This particular machine would give you small electric shocks from the controller which I thought was part of the game, but I now realize that was probably an electrical fault with that particular machine.
> there was at least one TRON arcade game... that had a totally different concept and which is now mostly deservedly forgotten
I can barely express how amazing and influential Discs of Tron was to me as a kid. The concept, the animation, the black light... totally captured my imagination right when I was first learning BASIC on TRS-Model III and C64.
Why are you dissing Discs of Tron? In the environmental cabinet, it was one of my favorite games of all time. The locations that still have one running are cherished to me and the other fans.
Ha! Sorry about that. I wanted to avoid hard-coding keycodes for the sake of legibility so I used 'W'.getCharcodeAt(0) — which unfortunately doesn't work for the arrow keys.
Some do, but not all. Most mouse ergonomics are made to be right handed, and since learning the mouse & keyboard is a new an alien concept for both left and right handed people, they can simply learn it with their dominant hand on the keyboard.
I wonder if that would make them better at micromanaging RTS games with keyboard shortcuts vs. shooting with the mouse in FPS.
Thanks! My band just released a new single: http://youtu.be/cDeRQ7rNP4Y (free download in description) — but that's quite a bit different from the music in the game.
I perused the rest of your videos, and couldn't really get into them. But Strange Loop really hit a sweet spot for me. The lyrics and melodies are phenomenal.
This is Korg MS-10, Korg's Polysix softsynth and a few samples, all cooked together in Ableton Live and drowned in Waves plugins, mostly H-Delay and the SSL channel.
var TOGGLE_CLEAR = 'C'.charCodeAt(0);
var TOGGLE_BOX = 'B'.charCodeAt(0);
var TOGGLE_UNDO_BOX = 'U'.charCodeAt(0);
var TOGGLE_FLIPFLOP = 'F'.charCodeAt(0);
var TOGGLE_RENDER = 'R'.charCodeAt(0);
var TOGGLE_DEBUG = 'N'.charCodeAt(0);
There's definitely room for experimentation! At some point I want to incorporate the cloth more in the actual gameplay itself, whether it's in this demo or something else.
It's a bit limited though, the forces exerted on the grid need to be within a relatively narrow range if the simulation is to obey the laws of sanity.
Cool demo. Turns out it kind of ruins the game because it makes the task of timing turns so much harder, but there was no way of knowing that until you tried it :) Great experiment, though!
I actually really enjoyed the weird spin on gameplay and didn't have the timings issue you raised. However I did have problems forgetting which lightcycle I was after I died (that one lap around the board seemed to throw me every time!)
I do like this game a lot though - if just for the novelty factor
Too bad the keyboard layout diagram at the upper left doesn't do anything when clicked on. If clicking on the diagram keys had the same result as pressing the corresponding keyboard key, it could be playable on touch devices that lack keyboards ifyou added a way to start with a click.
Kills Firefox Developer Edition on MacBook Air. I still can see the demo, but the entire browser becomes unresponsive and the only option is to force-close it.
Uses all the CPU my single firefox thread can take, on both my home computer and work computer. I couldn't figure out what was wrong at first because it rendered beautifully and would respond enough to eventually start a(n unplayable) game after I mashed 'x' a bunch. It was only once I tried to close the tab that I realized it was being incredibly unresponsive.
To be fair, it's incredibly CPU-heavy. It uses an iterative approach to calculate the forces exerted on the grid, so for each frame it calculates the force exerted on each node a set number of times. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verlet_integration)
However, this shouldn't be so heavy that the Firefox JS engine struggles with it...
Yeah the weird thing is that aside from being unresponsive it seems to run fine. The lines move around and the fabric stretches and waves smoothly. That's on an older i3, and a newer 3.GHz i5. I bet it works properly in chrome. I like Firefox but I always seem to have performance issues with it.
Wow, thanks! I just used Sublime Text 2 (which I admittedly haven't bought so the prompt to buy it pops up every now and then when I save, gulp!). I have a ruler set at 80 chars and try not to surpass it.
Also, I have a JSHint plugin installed on Sublime which scans the document every time I save it and checks for missing semicolons, implicitly declared variables, etc.
I felt a headache/migraine coming up within a minute and immediately closed it. I can't afford to play Hotline Miami for the screen shaking effect that adds, either.
I know one more guy who complained about Hotline Miami's screen shake: Totalbiscuit. Maybe I should try and link it to him on Twitter in hopes that he'll give me feedback.
Wow, I'm surprised how powerful that effect is. I only played for a couple minutes (very cool), and I think it's been about a minute of my vision waving.
I know it's become popular to integrate that kind of thing into apps and sites, but personally I'd rather not have twitter (and FB) widgets that track all of my activity across sites.
Easy enough to copy the URL and make a twitter post.
The funny thing is, Disney probably would do that, despite it being almost criminally stupid. Given that they (supposedly anyway) intend to continue the Tron franchise with more movies, anything that helps create / sustain interest in Tron is a Good Thing for Disney. The smarter thing for them to do would be to contact the author of this, and say "Hey can we hire you?" or something of that nature, instead of sending threats.
http://www.mobygames.com/game/arcade/discs-of-tron
There was also a TRON arcade game that was a mismash of mini-games, one of which was the light-cycles:
http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=10204
I see from Google that indeed many, many people refer to this "use moving wall to make the other guy crash" style of game as "TRON" now, but TRON actually just put a brand name on a game genre that had been around:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_%28video_game%29
A home game circa 1977, years before TRON:
http://www.mobygames.com/game/atari-2600/surround
"Snake" to TRON could actually be one of the earliest, if not the earliest, example of a big-budget studio movie adapting a video game concept. Doing so surprisingly directly.
Now, of course, half the movies that come out of Hollywood seem to have action bits that are vaguely video-game inspired.