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Super ZZT
''ZZT'' is a 1991 action-adventure puzzle video game and game creation system developed and published by Potomac Computer Systems for MS-DOS. It was later released as freeware in 1997. It is an early game allowing user-generated content using object-oriented programming. Players control a smiley face to battle various creatures and solve puzzles in different grid-based boards in a chosen world. It has four worlds where players explore different boards and interact with objects such as ammo, bombs, and scrolls to reach the end of the game. It includes an in-game editor, allowing players to develop worlds using the game's scripting language, ZZT-OOP. The game was designed by mechanical engineering student Tim Sweeney in roughly six to nine months. It was built from a text editor conceived in 1989 to build a better editor for Pascal, after disliking editors that came with other programming languages for his computer. During development, he experimented with adding creatures and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Potomac Computer Systems
Epic Games, Inc. is an American video game and software developer and publisher based in Cary, North Carolina. The company was founded by Tim Sweeney as Potomac Computer Systems in 1991, originally located in his parents' house in Potomac, Maryland. Following its first commercial video game release, '' ZZT'' (1991), the company became Epic MegaGames, Inc. in early 1992 and brought on Mark Rein, who has been its vice president since. After moving the headquarters to Cary in 1999, the studio changed its name to Epic Games. Epic Games develops Unreal Engine, a commercially available game engine which also powers their internally developed video games, such as ''Fortnite'' and the ''Unreal'', '' Gears of War'' and ''Infinity Blade'' series. In 2014, Unreal Engine was named the "most successful videogame engine" by ''Guinness World Records''. Epic Games owns the game developers Chair Entertainment, Psyonix, Mediatonic and Harmonix, as well as cloud-based software developer Cloud ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Unreal (1998 Video Game)
''Unreal'' is a first-person shooter video game developed by Epic MegaGames and Digital Extremes and published by GT Interactive for Microsoft Windows in May 1998. It was powered by Unreal Engine, an original game engine. The game reached sales of 1.5 million units by 2002. Since the release of ''Unreal'', the franchise has had one sequel and two different series based on the ''Unreal'' universe. One official bonus pack, the Epic-released Fusion Map Pack, can be downloaded free of charge. ''Unreal Mission Pack: Return to Na Pali'', developed by Legend Entertainment, was released in June 1999, and added 17 new missions to the single-player campaign of ''Unreal''. ''Unreal'' and ''Return to Na Pali'' would later be bundled together as ''Unreal Gold''. Additionally, the games were updated to run on the ''Unreal Tournament'' version of the game engine. Plot The player takes on the part of Prisoner 849, aboard the prison spacecraft ''Vortex Rikers''. During transport to a moon-based ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
University Of Maryland, College Park
The University of Maryland, College Park (University of Maryland, UMD, or simply Maryland) is a public land-grant research university in College Park, Maryland. Founded in 1856, UMD is the flagship institution of the University System of Maryland. It is also the largest university in both the state and the Washington metropolitan area, with more than 41,000 students representing all fifty states and 123 countries, and a global alumni network of over 388,000. Together, its 12 schools and colleges offer over 200 degree-granting programs, including 92 undergraduate majors, 107 master's programs, and 83 doctoral programs. UMD is a member of the Association of American Universities and competes in intercollegiate athletics as a member of the Big Ten Conference. The University of Maryland's proximity to the nation's capital has resulted in many research partnerships with the federal government; faculty receive research funding and institutional support from many agencies, such as ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Video Game Programmer
A game programmer is a software engineer, programmer, or computer scientist who primarily develops codebases for video games or related software, such as game development tools. Game programming has many specialized disciplines, all of which fall under the umbrella term of "game programmer". A game programmer should not be confused with a game designer, who works on game design. History In the early days of video games (from the early 1970s to mid-1980s), a game programmer also took on the job of a designer and artist. This was generally because the abilities of early computers were so limited that having specialized personnel for each function was unnecessary. Game concepts were generally light and games were only meant to be played for a few minutes at a time, but more importantly, art content and variations in gameplay were constrained by computers' limited power. Later, as specialized arcade hardware and home systems became more powerful, game developers could develop d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
PC Speaker
A PC speaker is a loudspeaker built into some IBM PC compatible computers. The first IBM Personal Computer, model 5150, employed a standard 2.25 inch magnetic driven (dynamic) speaker. More recent computers use a tiny moving-iron or piezo speaker instead. The speaker allows software and firmware to provide auditory feedback to a user, such as to report a hardware fault. A PC speaker generates waveforms using the programmable interval timer, an Intel 8253 or 8254 chip. Use cases BIOS/UEFI error codes The PC speaker is used during the power-on self-test (POST) sequence to indicate errors during the boot process. Since it is active before the graphics card, it can be used to communicate "beep codes" related to problems that prevent the much more complex initialization of the graphics card to take place. For example, the Video BIOS usually cannot activate a graphics card unless working RAM is present in the system while beeping the speaker is possible with just R ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Code Page 437
Code page 437 (CCSID 437) is the character set of the original IBM PC (personal computer). It is also known as CP437, OEM-US, OEM 437, PC-8, or DOS Latin US. The set includes all printable ASCII characters as well as some accented letters (diacritics), Greek letters, icons, and line-drawing symbols. It is sometimes referred to as the "OEM font" or "high ASCII", or as "extended ASCII" (one of many mutually incompatible ASCII extensions). This character set remains the primary set in the core of any EGA and VGA-compatible graphics card. As such, text shown when a PC reboots, before fonts can be loaded and rendered, is typically rendered using this character set. Many file formats developed at the time of the IBM PC are based on code page 437 as well. Display adapters The original IBM PC contained this font as a 9×14 pixels-per-character font stored in the ROM of the IBM Monochrome Display Adapter (MDA) and an 8×8 pixels-per-character font of the Color Graphics Adapter ( CGA) ca ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Boolean Data Type
In computer science, the Boolean (sometimes shortened to Bool) is a data type that has one of two possible values (usually denoted ''true'' and ''false'') which is intended to represent the two truth values of logic and Boolean algebra. It is named after George Boole George Boole (; 2 November 1815 – 8 December 1864) was a largely self-taught English mathematician, philosopher, and logician, most of whose short career was spent as the first professor of mathematics at Queen's College, Cork in ..., who first defined an algebraic system of logic in the mid 19th century. The Boolean data type is primarily associated with Conditional (computer programming), conditional statements, which allow different actions by changing control flow depending on whether a programmer-specified Boolean ''condition'' evaluates to true or false. It is a special case of a more general ''logical data type—''logic does not always need to be Boolean (see probabilistic logic). Generali ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Invisible Wall
An invisible wall is a boundary in a video game that limits where a player character can go in a certain area, but does not appear as a physical obstacle. The term can also refer to an obstacle that in reality could easily be bypassed, such as a mid-sized rock or short fence, which does not allow the character to jump over it within the context of the game. In 2D games, the edge of the screen itself can form an invisible wall, since a player character may be prevented from traveling off the edge of the screen. In 3D games, invisible walls are used similarly to prevent a player leaving the gameplay area, or getting trapped in a small inescapable space, though visible boundaries such as stone walls or fences are generally preferred. Completely invisible walls are cited to be level design bugs, and might be "left-over geometry" from an earlier version of the level or an object's improperly-aligned collision box. Nevertheless, designers might add invisible walls on cliffs to keep ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Health (game Terminology)
Health is an attribute in a video game or tabletop game that determines the maximum amount of damage or loss of stamina that a character or object can take before dying or losing consciousness. In role-playing games, this typically takes the form of hit points (HP), a numerical attribute representing the health of a character or object. The game character can be a player character, a boss, or a mob. Health can also be attributed to destructible elements of the game environment or inanimate objects such as vehicles and their individual parts. In video games, health is often represented by visual elements such as a numerical fraction, a health bar or a series of small icons, though it may also be represented acoustically, such as through a character's heartbeat. Mechanics In video games, as in tabletop role-playing games, an object usually loses health as a result of being attacked. Protection points or armor help them to reduce the damage taken. Characters acting as tanks usually ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
HUD (video Gaming)
In video gaming, the HUD (heads-up display) or status bar is the method by which information is visually relayed to the player as part of a game's user interface. It takes its name from the head-up displays used in modern aircraft. The HUD is frequently used to simultaneously display several pieces of information including the main character's health, items, and an indication of game progression (such as score or level). Shown on the HUD While the information that is displayed on the HUD depends greatly on the game, there are many features that players recognize across many games. Most of them are static onscreen so that they stay visible during gameplay. Common features include: * Health/lives – this might include the player's character and possibly other important characters, such as allies or bosses. Real-time strategy games usually show the health of every unit visible on screen. Also, in many (but not all) first- and third-person shooters, when the player is damage ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Boss Fight Books
Boss Fight Books is a Los Angeles-based book publisher and its eponymous series of books about video games. Similar to the style of 33⅓, a series of books about individual record albums, each book focuses solely on one video game. The company was founded by Gabe Durham in June 2013, and following a successful Kickstarter campaign in July, they released their first book, ''EarthBound'' by Ken Baumann in January 2014. The idea for the series came when Durham was reading Jeff Ryan's ''Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America'', as Durham wished that the book would slow down and provide more depth to the games it covered. After finding there was no equivalent of 33⅓ for video games, Durham pitched the idea of the series to his friend, Ken Baumann, who agreed to write the first book and serve as the series' designer. After securing agreements with authors for the first five books, Durham turned to Kickstarter, seeking $5,000 in funding, a target that was met within eight ho ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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