[tcaudilllg]

Playing Harvest Moon a few days back, I recalled in its gameplay my original vision for Dyne.

It had occurred to me several years ago, while playing Lufia II ( I think) that the best way to make programming easier for people on a wide scale would be to encapsulate the various statements and functions into self-contained "capsules", kind of along the lines of the "capsules" in Robotrek/Slapstick. The idea was that variable "capsules" could be registered (think Harvest Moon vegetables in the ground) and assigned values upon their creation. These capsules could be moved around a field by an "avatar" in a 2D environment similar to Zelda/Lufia/Harvest Moon. By lining up blocks like programming structures, a universally accessible mode of programming would be possible. Just as easily as people pick up blocks and pots over their heads and replace them in RPGs, so could people "pick up" variables and control structures and even cluster them together into subroutines. (Now that I think of it, ZZT played a large role, too. I made a piano board with which the player "face" could play music over a series of NPCs that were scripted to play notes when touched. I realized that for that situation, a tile * pixel environment would be ideal. Then came the Lufia block-puzzle observation...)

Such an environment was impossible with the programming technology of the time. It would be dynamic, and the programming structures produced would necessarily need to be reducible to interpretation for reasons of testing. A real-time dynamic programming control structure was necessarily integral to the language the capsules would module. Furthermore, a scheme was needed to link capsules of a single control structure or subroutines together into a "field" of effect independent of the other capsules. The field would need to be "active" and real-time: iterating over its content at specific intervals, so that they held a continuous effect over the program's flow. Both of these structures were necessary to any language that interacted harmonically with the 2D environment, for the purpose of testing effects programmed by the arrangement of the capsules. They became "causes" and "fields", and were designed to work in hand with each other.

[Terry]

Well, I don't know how useful that would be, but I know that I'd have a lot of fun picking up commands and throwing them into position :)

Reminds me of a game called... well, I don't remember what it's called, but basically, you played as a cyborg, and it had a built in mini-game where you designed a circuit in your own brain to solve certain game related problems - for example, there was a "hearing" module, a "voice to text" module and a "text to voice" one, and a "english to gibberish" (can't remember the game's language) translation module, and when you put them all together, you could understand the alien language as you heard it.

Some fantastic ideas in the game, but the game itself just didn't work out... pity that sometimes happens.

[edit: Knew I'd think of it! It was The Koshan Conspiracy.]
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[RuneLancer]

That's certainly interesting, but I don't see how it's anything more than a way to visually represent object oriented programming. Only, possibly, with less features (unless you have some very advanced control mechanisms that would simulate inheritence, encapsulation, and other important OOP concepts that make it useful to the programming community.)

Above all, the problem with this, IMO, is that it's not very convinient for large projects. If each sentence in this post were defined as a function, and I could build these functions by dragging and dropping words into a textbox, I think I'd spend a good hour "dragging up" my post. ;) Whereas it took me only a few minutes to type up.

A means of visually representing OOP would be interesting as an analysis tool, though. I'm not sure how well it would perform as a serious design tool however; I guess I'll just have to wait and see...
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[DrunkenCoder]

[LeoDraco]

[tcaudilllg]