How so? I've always found C# docs to be quite a bit better than the equivalent Sun/Oracle's Java docs. Language features like auto-property/fields, Lamda expressions, LINQ, etc have been sorely missed in Java (at least by me) until recently. Admittedly, the C# frameworks are a bit lacking compared to the Java ecosystem though. I will admit that I've had to get back into Java recently for my job and after starting to use IntelliJ, it's actually made Java mor enjoyable.

My programming started with BASIC on an IBM XT back in the 80s and various programming books, mainly just copying the programs as written then trying to modify them. This book in particular was pivotal for me as I loved the old Infocom text adventures of the time:

Write Your Own Adventure Programs For Your Microcomputer:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxv0SsvibDMTYkFJbUswOHFQclE/view

(It looks like these books were released for free by Usborne: https://usborne.com/browse-books/features/computer-and-coding-books/ ... what a nostalgia trip!)

In high-school I learned C and LISP for Autocad programming. I continued to learn about C (plus a little C++) and ASM thanks to John Carmack and DOOM/Quake. Wrote my own computer games (mainly RTS as the Command and Conquer series was big back then) ... nothing great but I thought they were cool.

Dabbled in Java a bit in college but ultimately shifted to C++ and C# after getting a consultancy job and that is what I continued with until recently. Now I'm back into Java and currently trying to catch up on all the front-end Javascript libraries now as well as tinkering with Perl, GO, and Objective-C.

I could never get into these text adventure games.

I think I played Space Invaders on that machine in my parents' friends' house.

Reminds me of making text adventures with my dad when i was a kid. ahhh, this is comforting. omg those tape backups for the c64...

You're just a different type of gamer than those of us who thrived during the early eras of gaming. My brother and I used to do speed runs through Full Throttle just for fun because we enjoyed adventure titles so much. It's like watching your favorite movie over and over again, except that you get to interact with the characters.

Especially Full Throttle, Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max, most of the modern Tex Murphy adventures, and the Monkey Islands. Mostly Lucas Arts and Sierra, but companies like Access also provided hours and hours of the tedious adventure game shlock we enjoy. Hell, there were days where an entire 24 hours was spent playing text adventures, some of those hours spent replaying a game we had played through 100 times or more.

Monkey Island games were always wacky and difficult puzzles simply because it required you to think of objects in such ways as to break the fourth wall of the game itself. Guybrush and his infinite pocket space.

Also note, these are good games despite their frustrating bits. There were far more frustrations prior to the days where you are given dialog choices, when you were required to type in all of the dialog options using key words. Cough, cough, older Tex Murphy games and just about every text adventure from the dawn of home computers.

I loved those games, but many of them turned into puzzles that maybe one person in the family finally figured out after brute force trying thousands of combinations of objects with each other. I did that multiple times in the original Myst. I think there was one passcode that took close to 10,000 attempts. LOL!

Or how about games that had dead ends but didn't alert the player? Cough, cough Maniac Mansion. People could die, but as long as one person was left alive, the game never ended, even though only the bad endings are left. But it's not like modern games, some of the bad endings were themselves puzzles, and some deaths lead to a half good and half bad ending, like winning a lottery and then having a character abandon the plot altogether because he/she is rich and then THE END.

Those were the days. None of this FNAF shit -- which is really what deserves the infamy of terrible, convoluted puzzles...

Before video games became as massively popular as they are today, it wasn't always a requirement to make your game easily solved and you were not always provided with prompts for failure or success until many grueling hours, days, months, sometimes YEARS of random attempts. How many families bought a Rubik's Cube versus how many people solved it without cheating and learning the algorithms from another source?

Go back hundreds or thousands of years and it wasn't common for chess or go or xiangqi (the most popular game in the entire world TODAY) to come with rules at all, so only regions where national ruling boards were created will there be standardized rules; so, the truth, rules, patterns, and solves of games have traditionally been obfuscated and considered lifelong intellectual pursuits; and, it's only a recent, corporatized reimagining of games that has the requirement of providing your functional requirements and/or game rulings so as to maintain the value of its intellectual property. I mean, look at how Risk has evolved since the 1960s -- now there's a card that you can draw called a "Cease Fire" card which ends the game, making games much shorter and not epic at all. Easy to market, but old school players want the long stand offs -- I mean, if you're going to play Risk... TO THE BITTER END!

So I'm playing Pillars of Eternity...

It is wonderful. Practically everything I dreamed it could be. There is a hint of the modern mechanics I find distasteful. I really don't want all my characters spamming minor debuffs that last 7 seconds each in every fight, but I've been able to pick passive abilities for the most part and keep special stuff on the spellcasters where it belongs.

It's built with such obvious love. Everything from the title screen onward: the careful reproduction of the infinity engine aesthetic, the writing and characterisation, the soundtrack (I never notice music in games), the little text-adventure style sections, the puzzles... I was genuinely almost moved to tears by it all within my first few minutes of this incredible game.

Baldur's Gate III. I'm playing Baldur's Gate III.

And for that reason, *promote

it's more like text adventure with embeded video:P
on the other hand, I'm all for giving power to the people. the way VS is set up now, you're driving people away. lately it seems like there are always the same avatars posting, not counting occasional spammers. and the visit to the site has surely dropped too (would be nice if you could inform us with some site stats from time to time, @dag) so you've got nothing to lose if you open up invocational powers for "the lower classes"

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

I've been talking to some of my Chinese colleagues and they tell me that there are VAST amounts of traffic to MegaUpload type sites throughout Asia that are dark to the Western world because of the language barrier.

This problem isn't going to go away. The copying cat is out of the bag, but there is a big upside that a lot of people don't acknowledge:

Millions more eyeballs are watching movies than would have is they weren't shared. The trick is harnessing this in a "free" setting. In the short term, we're probably talking about embedding things into the movies that are hard to strip - like product placements - as annoying as they are.

In the long term there may be other creative solutions. I was listening to this very nerdy podcast about the old Infocom text adventure games like Zork - and they mentioned their use of "feelies" as a form of copy protection. Perhaps, as movies become more interactive - this will be an option.

Sorry to disappoint, but it's actually a text adventure.

I found a bunch for my phone, but they require a 'Z-code' emulator to run. found that, too, I even found the unzip ap I need to install them, but it's zipped! drats.

In reply to this comment by JAPR:
Might this be the game you're referring to? http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/game.shtml

I never got too far in it, but I did rather enjoy the bit that I did play. Text-based games are both frustrating and amazingly fun at the same time, since you're never quite sure exactly what limitations there are, unlike conventional games.

In reply to this comment by schmawy:
that's the stuff. my fav was 'hitchhiker's guide' which still runs out there on the web as an emulator. I found a bunch for palm os that I'm going to check out.

In reply to this comment by JAPR:
I remember playing some Oregon Trail back in early elementary school. My younger brother was the one who inevitably died of something or other every single time I played.

What sort of text games are you thinking of, purely text-based, or stuff like Police Quest back on those actually floppy disks?

In reply to this comment by schmawy:
Good times indeed. I go all the way back to atari. I even died of dysentary on the Oregon Trail. I always loved text adventure games and was recently looking to see if there is still anyone writing good ones. perfect to run on phones or pda's you'd think, right?

Might this be the game you're referring to? http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/game.shtml

I never got too far in it, but I did rather enjoy the bit that I did play. Text-based games are both frustrating and amazingly fun at the same time, since you're never quite sure exactly what limitations there are, unlike conventional games.

In reply to this comment by schmawy:
that's the stuff. my fav was 'hitchhiker's guide' which still runs out there on the web as an emulator. I found a bunch for palm os that I'm going to check out.

In reply to this comment by JAPR:
I remember playing some Oregon Trail back in early elementary school. My younger brother was the one who inevitably died of something or other every single time I played.

What sort of text games are you thinking of, purely text-based, or stuff like Police Quest back on those actually floppy disks?

In reply to this comment by schmawy:
Good times indeed. I go all the way back to atari. I even died of dysentary on the Oregon Trail. I always loved text adventure games and was recently looking to see if there is still anyone writing good ones. perfect to run on phones or pda's you'd think, right?

that's the stuff. my fav was 'hitchhiker's guide' which still runs out there on the web as an emulator. I found a bunch for palm os that I'm going to check out.

In reply to this comment by JAPR:
I remember playing some Oregon Trail back in early elementary school. My younger brother was the one who inevitably died of something or other every single time I played.

What sort of text games are you thinking of, purely text-based, or stuff like Police Quest back on those actually floppy disks?

In reply to this comment by schmawy:
Good times indeed. I go all the way back to atari. I even died of dysentary on the Oregon Trail. I always loved text adventure games and was recently looking to see if there is still anyone writing good ones. perfect to run on phones or pda's you'd think, right?

I remember playing some Oregon Trail back in early elementary school. My younger brother was the one who inevitably died of something or other every single time I played.

What sort of text games are you thinking of, purely text-based, or stuff like Police Quest back on those actually floppy disks?

In reply to this comment by schmawy:
Good times indeed. I go all the way back to atari. I even died of dysentary on the Oregon Trail. I always loved text adventure games and was recently looking to see if there is still anyone writing good ones. perfect to run on phones or pda's you'd think, right?

Good times indeed. I go all the way back to atari. I even died of dysentary on the Oregon Trail. I always loved text adventure games and was recently looking to see if there is still anyone writing good ones. perfect to run on phones or pda's you'd think, right?

Bible(tm) 1.0 was OK for its time - but linear Text adventures just don't sell anymore. Bible just can't compete with generative MMOs. And the cranky Dad-King character? Katamari Damacy's was much more amusing. Fanboy should give it up.