Books like that are cool and were a big influence on my desire to become a programmer, but I didn’t know it at the time.
One of the bigger revelations I had first learning to program was based around a confusing thing I’d wondered about the very first time I saw a 3D video game, Super Mario 64. Up to that point my young brain could have imagined how a 2D game could be programmed, naively thinking they had just coded up every possible game state. But the sheer number of permutations in the 3D, open world plane immediately made me realize that was impossible to do because of the sheer number of permutations - so I concluded something else must have been afoot, but it was all mystical to me.
Anyway I was struggling bad with programming concepts very early on and tried to make an interactive multiplayer text adventure game in the same exact way as this book, struggled mightily, until one day I realized some of it could be done algorithmically rather than encoding every possible permutation into the game - and it clicked. A very vivid and surreal moment for me that I’ll never forget. As we age and get more senior, we forget little sparks like that sometimes I think. Thanks for posting this
>my young brain could have imagined how a 2D game could be programmed, naively thinking they had just coded up every possible game state. But the sheer number of permutations in the 3D, open world plane immediately made me realize that was impossible to do because of the sheer number of permutations - so I concluded something else must have been afoot, but it was all mystical to me.
This is so nostalgically intimately familiar it is nearly uncanny.
I to remember having the exact same thought with the original Pokemon games. I could never wrap my head around how the battles could handle randomness.
In a similar vein, I remember that when I was learning to program, I would look at applications like Word and get overwhelmed with the idea that you would need to implement everything from scratch.
If you're interested in Ace of Aces, a new deluxe version of the game is on Kickstarter right now, with 7 days left for the campaign[0] (which is funded and well into its stretch-goals).
The Kickstarter says you can't pit two planes of the same side against each other... Is there something in the maths that stops that (I can't see why there would be, from the main post) or is it purely because the book doesn't have the right art in it?
it's because of the maths: I do feel like the article overcomplicated things a bit: the basic idea is, each individual book is basically a choose-your-own-adventure of flying around a static opposing aircraft. If you pick page numbers yourself you can happily just fly around your 'opponent', who never moves on their own. But, the page numbers for opposing books correspond to the inverse of the move in the other one: so when you take the page number from your opponent, you are doing the inverse of their move on your book (which may not be an option listed on your page). This basically means there are two opposite maps: if you tried to play with two books from the same side it would seem like you are just wrestling over the controls of one plane.
That's great. Back in 2014 they kickstarted a Handy Rotary with a different production crew, but the screwed up the page order at the last minute so that the page numbers are on the inside edges of the page. I'm happy to see these started up again.
It's always interesting to me how people find bad math bugs in the RNG in old games that have been deconstructed.
You think back to when the game was new, and you remember talking to people who seemed to be superstitious about the game behavior. And it turns out they were right. The random numbers were NOT fair, and sometimes punitively so.
I think I heard there was a bug in UO where users with certain ranges of low user ID numbers always lost certain rolls because of a bug that unfairly sorted them in the case of a tie.
>It's always interesting to me how people find bad math bugs in the RNG in old games that have been deconstructed.
Yes, but so what? The point of videogames is to be fun, not have a true random RNG. Often such small bugs in the code were part of the gameplay and finding and exploiting them was part of the fun/competition.
And since games are usually rushed out the door to meet the November pre-Chrismas sale bonanza, everything that's good enough gets shipped. Making your RNG even better won't increase sales.
Fun! I bought all the versions of this game off of EBay, and showed my kids how to play. My youngest struggled with the abstractions in the game, so I 3D printed a hex board and the airplanes. It took way longer than I thought to figure out all the moves, but I got it down with little template cards he could reference. The fun part is now we can play 2 planes vs. 2 planes, or 3 player!
As an experiment, I tried to create a simple "Rock, Paper, Scissors" version but I was too stupid to figure out how. (How hard could it possibly be, I thought.)
Perhaps when I have time to study the article/patent I can finally figure it out.
The algebra is systematically incorrect throughout the article. In airplane space:
Aga = Gag (wrong!)
should be:
Aga = reciprocal of Gag
since the A and G planes always have inverse perspective of each other. (Imagine both of them starting with a world at A=G=I, where I is facile to face with the opposing plane; but any pair of inverse perspectives works.):
I = identity
x' x = 1 (x' is reciprocal (inverse)of x)
A' = G <=> AG = A A' = I
a' = g
A_2 = Aga = (Gag)' = (G_2)'
<=> (A_2)(G_2) = (Aga)(gaG) = A g a a' g' A' = I
I'm page number space, the article's algebra is correct (but that's algebra, not a matrix transformation), because the the opposing books are reciprocals of each other in airplane space. This also explains why an A book can't fight an A book.
Since A=G and Aga=Gag in page number space, this also shows that ga=ag in page number space. ga (and ag, and a, an g) can be seen as transformations (turn n pages, where n can be positive or negative). And to make this a proper algebra (group action), we can say that A and G are also transformations, applied to an arbitrary starting point in the books.
In the end, the page turns are transformation matrixes (because all algebraic groups have a matrix represention), but it's not the 3D airplane transformation matrix.
Homework: create a matrix-multiplication representation for the algebra of adding integers.
Thank you. I've always wondered how this worked. I have Star Wars TIE Fighter vs X-Wing and Battletech versions of this same thing. A friend and I played the hell out of these.
There were a lot of two player "picture book" (as opposed to the usual solo text-based) gamebooks published in the 1980s, ultimately inspired by Ace of Aces (which from 1980 was the first as far as I know). There were the "Lost Worlds" swordfighting ones, there were dragon-rider ones based on the "Dragonriders of Pern" series, ones where you were Old West gunfighters, etc.
The Lost Worlds series was continued in Japan as Queen's Blade as late as the previous decade. Cheesecake art, but the game mechanics are the same and the books are compatible.
You’ll notice it’s not entirely symmetric, because the torque of a rotary engine makes it much easier to turn and spin with the propeller, not against it.
You can also tune “allowed” moves to match the capability of a particular aircraft (and that’s why there is a whole series of these books that you can use interchangeably in any Allied-German pair: ...but some planes don’t have access to all the manoeuvres).
I played this and remember the Allies Sopwith Camel had the right-hand J turn the other planes didn't because of the rotary torque.
In school, I liked maths for its own sake. It was only when I became a programmer that I started to see practical applications. Needless to say, my appreciation only grew from there.
The main topic of the article is interesting, but the Not Tetris and Navy Fire Control Computer YT video asides/references were also new to me and fascinating.
Nova also did a similar two-book game that was set in the old west. One book is the lawman, one book is the villain. Exploring the old west town, shootouts, etc.
One of the bigger revelations I had first learning to program was based around a confusing thing I’d wondered about the very first time I saw a 3D video game, Super Mario 64. Up to that point my young brain could have imagined how a 2D game could be programmed, naively thinking they had just coded up every possible game state. But the sheer number of permutations in the 3D, open world plane immediately made me realize that was impossible to do because of the sheer number of permutations - so I concluded something else must have been afoot, but it was all mystical to me.
Anyway I was struggling bad with programming concepts very early on and tried to make an interactive multiplayer text adventure game in the same exact way as this book, struggled mightily, until one day I realized some of it could be done algorithmically rather than encoding every possible permutation into the game - and it clicked. A very vivid and surreal moment for me that I’ll never forget. As we age and get more senior, we forget little sparks like that sometimes I think. Thanks for posting this