3D engine made of MS Excel formulae (opens in new tab)

(gamasutra.com)

193 pointsjbawgs8y ago32 comments

32 comments

As an excel developer in the 90's, this brings up great memories. I wrote the Doom Excel credits in Office 95. I wish I'd had thought of doing this instead. Kudos.

dTal8y ago

Ah, HN. I came to comment "anyone remember the Doom engine in Excel 95?" And instead the top comment is "I wrote the Doom engine in Excel 95".

Can't top that. Kudos, sir.

keville8y ago

(Sending some kudos your way, too, having lost many an hour to that Easter egg on otherwise-game-deprived school machines.)

ramses08y ago

My brain is desperately attempting to recall the sequence of steps to open it. Ctrl + Shift, clicking something in the Help -> About... dialog box, then F5 or something? And/or there was a star-wars scroller in one of other apps, right?

zeusk8y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb9AXBowb0E

ZenoArrow8y ago

I remember the flight sim easter egg in Excel 97, that was certainly unexpected!

monocasa8y ago

Do you think there's anyway that something like that could be shipped by Microsoft these days?

jasonallen8y ago

A dev on my team wrote the following Excel 2000 credits (it was a flying carpet-like game). Afaik that was around the time BillG put his foot down and mandated no new credits. Enterprise customers felt these credits were both a sign of wasted engineering time ("you could have fixed x bugs instead!" and wasted disk space. It's logical, but only partly true. Shipping software on CD means a very long stabilization phase. You couldn't really "fix more bugs" because every bug fix had a risk of introducing another one. That means some Office teams would literally complete their work a year before shipping. They'd sit around half-heartedly helping other teams. That's when someone would take time to write credits. These credits were often tightly-optimized C and assembly, taking very little space. The facts couldn't overcome the optics, so that was the end of fun Microsoft credits.

nxc188y ago

Not at MSFT but no. Easter Eggs aren’t worth the security risk of added code.

See ‘Trustworthy Computing’ initiative from the 2000s.

daveslash8y ago

Was the Excel 95' Doom written in VBA or something else?

RcouF1uZ4gsC8y ago

Spreadsheets in general and Excel in particular are magic. It is very likely that spreadsheets were the killer application that drove the demand for PC's by businesses.

Spreadsheets are truly the programming tool of the masses (who don't even necessarily think they are programming).

grizzles8y ago

Since Excel is a pure functional programming paradigm, I suppose this will make FP people happy to see FP taken so far without mixing in any imperative constructs. It's the Übermensch of functional 3d engines.

xjjfuudud8y ago

calling this a functional 3d engine is a stretch, but sure grats functional programming, you have entered the 80s

EvanAnderson8y ago

I just watched a talk this morning about doing high dynamic range photography in Excel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkQJdaGGVM8). Looks like now I've got something to watch tomorrow!

f00_8y ago

that is great, both of these reminded me of deepexcel: multi-layer neural networks implemented with a spreadsheet!:

http://www.deepexcel.net/

Pulcinella8y ago

I really like how the only VBA macros are for catching key inputs so you don’t have to manually update your location cell.

Most “look what this crazy person built in excel!” things end up really having VBA do all the work.

jacquesm8y ago

That's very neat. Another nice example of the power of excel and spreadsheets in general is the fast.ai course, almost all of the basics are covered in spreadsheets.

cr0sh8y ago

This is crazy. I'm pretty floored that someone did something like this.

Then again, we've all seen (or worse, have been roped into trying to convert!) some of the crazy Excel monstrosities some manager wrote that runs an entire company or such!

Prior to seeing this, I had found (somewhere - dunno if it still exists out there) a "tutorial" on how a neural network works - and the whole thing was done as an Excel worksheet. I thought that was pretty insane at the time...

nayuki8y ago

As a less extreme example, an implementation of the AES cipher in Excel formulas (no macros): https://www.nayuki.io/page/aes-cipher-internals-in-excel

bonzini8y ago

That reminds me of when my mother-in-law asked me if you could compute IBAN check digits in Excel. The suggestion by IT had been to cut-and-paste customer data into a random "compute IBAN check digit" website, one customer at a time, because they couldn't be arsed to update the database automatically.

JasonFruit8y ago

I've always thought a data-centered programming language that compiles to an Excel spreadsheet would be a Fun Challenge™ and possibly even useful. Spreadsheets are an amazing tool. This is an amazing demonstration.

johnhenry8y ago

app4soft8y ago

Could be rewrited for LibreOffice Calc?

edent8y ago

It renders in LibreOffice - although I wasn't able to get the movement to work, even after enabling macros.

chris_wot8y ago

Try logging a bug, I know it might seem ridiculous but it may help with efforts to improve VBA compatibility.

1 more reply

katastic8y ago

That reminds me of people doing 3-D engines in MegaZeux.

http://vault.digitalmzx.net/screens2/cde248323538306a9712eb9...

MegaZeux is a ZZT successor.

https://image.dosgamesarchive.com/screenshots/zzt4.gif

And uses ASCII characters. MegaZeux up'd the ante and allowed you to edit the VGA text glyphs so you could make "sprites."

Back-in-the-day Megazeux and ZZT were like their own dedicated systems, like software console systems. It was really fun to see what people did with incredibly constrained systems.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

32 comments

jasonallen8y ago

As an excel developer in the 90's, this brings up great memories. I wrote the Doom Excel credits in Office 95. I wish I'd had thought of doing this instead. Kudos.

dTal8y ago

Ah, HN. I came to comment "anyone remember the Doom engine in Excel 95?" And instead the top comment is "I wrote the Doom engine in Excel 95".

Can't top that. Kudos, sir.

keville8y ago

(Sending some kudos your way, too, having lost many an hour to that Easter egg on otherwise-game-deprived school machines.)

ramses08y ago

zeusk8y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb9AXBowb0E

ZenoArrow8y ago

I remember the flight sim easter egg in Excel 97, that was certainly unexpected!

monocasa8y ago

Do you think there's anyway that something like that could be shipped by Microsoft these days?

jasonallen8y ago

nxc188y ago

Not at MSFT but no. Easter Eggs aren’t worth the security risk of added code.

See ‘Trustworthy Computing’ initiative from the 2000s.

daveslash8y ago

Was the Excel 95' Doom written in VBA or something else?

RcouF1uZ4gsC8y ago

Spreadsheets in general and Excel in particular are magic. It is very likely that spreadsheets were the killer application that drove the demand for PC's by businesses.

Spreadsheets are truly the programming tool of the masses (who don't even necessarily think they are programming).

grizzles8y ago

xjjfuudud8y ago

calling this a functional 3d engine is a stretch, but sure grats functional programming, you have entered the 80s

EvanAnderson8y ago

I just watched a talk this morning about doing high dynamic range photography in Excel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkQJdaGGVM8). Looks like now I've got something to watch tomorrow!

f00_8y ago

that is great, both of these reminded me of deepexcel: multi-layer neural networks implemented with a spreadsheet!:

http://www.deepexcel.net/

Pulcinella8y ago

I really like how the only VBA macros are for catching key inputs so you don’t have to manually update your location cell.

Most “look what this crazy person built in excel!” things end up really having VBA do all the work.

jacquesm8y ago

That's very neat. Another nice example of the power of excel and spreadsheets in general is the fast.ai course, almost all of the basics are covered in spreadsheets.

cr0sh8y ago

This is crazy. I'm pretty floored that someone did something like this.

Then again, we've all seen (or worse, have been roped into trying to convert!) some of the crazy Excel monstrosities some manager wrote that runs an entire company or such!

nayuki8y ago

As a less extreme example, an implementation of the AES cipher in Excel formulas (no macros): https://www.nayuki.io/page/aes-cipher-internals-in-excel

bonzini8y ago

JasonFruit8y ago

johnhenry8y ago

app4soft8y ago

Could be rewrited for LibreOffice Calc?

edent8y ago

It renders in LibreOffice - although I wasn't able to get the movement to work, even after enabling macros.

chris_wot8y ago

Try logging a bug, I know it might seem ridiculous but it may help with efforts to improve VBA compatibility.

1 more reply

katastic8y ago

That reminds me of people doing 3-D engines in MegaZeux.

http://vault.digitalmzx.net/screens2/cde248323538306a9712eb9...

MegaZeux is a ZZT successor.

https://image.dosgamesarchive.com/screenshots/zzt4.gif

And uses ASCII characters. MegaZeux up'd the ante and allowed you to edit the VGA text glyphs so you could make "sprites."

Back-in-the-day Megazeux and ZZT were like their own dedicated systems, like software console systems. It was really fun to see what people did with incredibly constrained systems.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse