This project is not exactly what it promises.<p>The title is "portable suckless [...] 90s-style Doom clone", however, in the technical details, it's specified that "this is my custom engine (raycastlib) based on raycasting, a technique used in Wolf3D engine, but it's improved, e.g. supporting multiple levels of floor and ceiling, so that the visual result is something between Wolf3D and Doom".<p>I don't think a that an improved raycasting engine qualifies as Doom-clone (in fact, this is the reason why the project is considerably less resource-intensive than Doom). If the project qualified itself as "Improved Wolfenstein engine", it'd probably get no attention.<p>It's admirable though that they released the assets with a very permissive license.<p>> a different, better direction than which the mainstream technology is taking, though this involves taking some steps back to before the things started to go wrong<p>There's definitely a significant self-absorption in this project. Modern mainstream gaming experience is different - not wrong - compared to what it was in the 90s; gamers looking for the 90s experience can still find modern retro-styled games. Also, it's not like everything from the 90s was gold. I actually do enjoy both AAA and indie FPSs.<p>> ["modern" programming (C++17, Rust, OOP etc.) or "advanced" engines] is an extremely bad choice for building long-lasting, accessible programs. New languages are a product of capitalism, evolved by the markets to serve corporations to make quick profit, not fulfilling the values that are good for the people.<p>I didn't read long enough to understand if this is a satire or not.
<i>"... attempts to avoid possible cultural dependencies and barriers (enemies are only robots, no violence on living beings)."</i><p>I'm sure violence against robots will be unacceptable in 10 years. Or even now:<p><a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2955544/Would-kick-robotic-dog-Google-video-regnites-debate-machines-treated-like-living-animals.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2955544/Woul...</a>
When I saw "C++17 and Rust are bad" I assumed it would be written in C89. I'm used to that kind of bad take.<p>But it's actually written in C++. There isn't a Makefile, just make.sh. And in there, I don't see the C++ standard specified. I'm guessing g++ defaults to C++98.<p>So that really makes you think. suckless means C++, but not the convenient parts like type inference. Not the safe parts like unique_ptr. A language with inheritance _and_ all of C's footguns.<p>What a head-scratcher. Excellent outsider art.
I admire the adherence to principle and depth of execution, however I find something about this incoherent.<p>Shaving off some aesthetic components of violence and positioning the work as anticapitalist does not address the core issue of every game project: <i>What does the game facilitate a study of?</i> That's not a leading question or "gotcha". It's just the thing every game player will ask at some point: What is it about? What do you do?<p>I believe the most likely answer to that is that it's primarily a technical study, and the game part of it is not exactly the focus, which is why the content of it is directionless "filler", opting to say less of the thing it emulates, but to on some level venerate it rather than critique it: it's still a game about shooting stuff and...that's it, it has nothing more to say, it doesn't "go" somewhere. And it will stay stuck there so long as it stays within the subset of what the original game did. Which makes it, in some sense, incomplete as a work. A tech demo with a bit of game bolted on, call it what you may.<p>If we proceed further in the direction of staying within principle and do not halt at the point where something Doom-like is possible, all these other development opportunities come up that seem more coherent with the ideology at play:<p>* Mazes/exploration gameplay(finding one's way home)
* Procedural landscapes/dream simulator
* Sports gameplay
* Networked virtual worlds<p>The only problem, then, is the feeling that this would break with tradition, but that's exactly it: it would be radical from a "positive" standpoint rather than a "negative" one to develop in a new direction.
That's an admirable project<p>I wish I could live long enough to see sentient robots become part of society and protest this violent game which discriminates robots and encourage violence towards machines.
#AIUnitedCancelAnarch<p>I also wish this wouldn't so political, I don't see what capitalism has done to this guy - including giving him the tools to create this game!
There are also plenty of games that can be played and studied freely.
Play it online here: <a href="https://drummyfish.gitlab.io/anarch/bin/web/anarch.html" rel="nofollow">https://drummyfish.gitlab.io/anarch/bin/web/anarch.html</a><p>To the creator thank you for making this. I also enjoyed reading the manifesto. Keep up the good work and never stop fighting capitalism.
From the “manifesto”:<p>> In today's world of capitalism and fascism<p>Today’s world is run by neoliberal planned economies, what some Communists might call “state-run capitalism” (usually in reference to China). Fascism and capitalism is so far away from an accurate description of how today’s world operates. When you’re that far on the left, you lose the ability to distinguish between Fascism and Liberalism.
Appreciate the open nature of the project. But this is sort of what state of the art web fps looks in 2020 ;)<p><a href="https://digiplay-gaming.itch.io/brawlbots" rel="nofollow">https://digiplay-gaming.itch.io/brawlbots</a><p>UE4 compiled to WebGL 2. The payload itself is a massive binary. My bias is still toward optimized WebGL 2 beating SDL 2 via emscriten. But that requires a deeper drive to demonstrate. Still, it's nice to have choices. And I think what we are seeing is definitely near native, AAA quality for web games which is exciting!