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Comment by fernly | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, not friendly a-tall. Never imagined a future vehicle would have a 1970s-era unix command line! Anyway said command line behaves oddly, cursor seems to get "above" the ">" prompt and then I can't type? I can see the point in that you can build up to some complexity without having to invest in a ton of artwork and pixel candy to create a believable GUI for the ship, but the cost in playability is high. I gather your implementation language is Lua... is there for Lua anything comparable to PyGame for Python where you could leverage some graphics?

In interactive mode, I zoomed out what seemed like quite a ways and didn't see anywhere to go.

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> said command line behaves oddly

Yeah, there are some prompt bugs on master; try the beta-1 release linked in my other comment for a more stable version. Will definitely be fixed before the next beta release.

Edit: if you can provide repro steps for the prompt bug that would be super helpful.

> I gather your implementation language is Lua... is there for Lua anything comparable to PyGame for Python where you could leverage some graphics?

Sure; I could easily create a GUI for the ship, but that would be a different game than the one I'm trying to make. There are plenty games like that out there already. I want something that feels more like TIS-100 than Endless Sky. (Not to knock the latter, but they already do a better job at making that kind of game than I ever could.)

On the other hand, part of the point of the game is that if some players want to play a more GUI-centric game, all that you need is already included to turn the game into that kind of game from the inside. All the HUD stuff and the graphics libs are exposed to the in-game Lua sandbox.

> I zoomed out what seemed like quite a ways and didn't see anywhere to go.

You have to use a portal to get to another star system.

MOAI might make a great front-end for you .. it has quite powerful text basics ..

Thanks; I'm quite happy with LÖVE. I've actually been quite impressed with how easy it is to work with the whole time.

Though speaking of frontends, it is actually also possible to get the game to open a socket and connect to it from Emacs, programming your ship from the outside. It's not very polished at this point, but I intend to expose the in-game UI over the nREPL protocol so you can code other clients for it if the in-game editor doesn't suit your fancy: https://gitlab.com/technomancy/bussard/blob/master/bussard.e...

Nice feature! I might give you a PR with a MOAI front-end some time soon .. :)

To repro a prompt bug:

    Windows 10
    Begin game
    ctrl-P (game says 'Cannot log into target.')
    ctrl-enter (console is broken)

Oh, it looks like that specific problem has been fixed, assuming you were running into it on the beta-1 release from itch.io. Thanks anyway.

Note that I'm not the rude poster upthread. I was just reporting since you asked for a report.

Anyway, that IS the version wherein I found that bug. Is that not the latest published release of the game for Windows?

Sorry I wasn't clear--I thought he was talking about a bug that had been introduced since the release, but it turned out it was the other way around. The bug was present in the latest beta-1 release but fixed in git master since then.

I hope to have a beta-2 release out in the next week or so.

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