Show HN: Micropolis/SimCity Clone in Emacs Lisp

(github.com)

61 points | by vkazanov 5 hours ago ago

14 comments

  • yuppiepuppie 11 minutes ago
  • michaelanckaert 3 hours ago

    This is great! We need more ASCII games/simulations and it's only a bonus if it's in Emacs :-)

  • DonHopkins 16 minutes ago

    Fantastic! Can you make Emacs shake the screen by scrolling vertically and horizontally whenever there's an earthquake?

    Finally RMS can play SimCity.

  • brimtown 2 hours ago

    This is wonderful. Consider decoupling the core from Emacs, or packaging in a way that doesn’t require it as heavily.

    I’ve been doing my own exploration of terminal ASCII games via Dwarf Fortress instead of SimCity. I’ve learned that letting a coding agent play is an interesting way to get feedback as well :)

    https://github.com/brimtown/claude-fortress

    • internet_points 8 minutes ago

      > Consider decoupling the core from Emacs, or packaging in a way that doesn’t require it as heavily.

      but then we'd have to write an interface package to run it from emacs

    • larsbrinkhoff an hour ago

      How would it be run without Emacs?

      You might point out that there are things like elisp.lisp that purports to run Emacs Lisp in Common Lisp, but I'm not sure that's viable for anything but trivial programs. There's also something for Guile, but I remain unconvinced.

    • hrmtst93837 an hour ago

      I tried something similar with a roguelike I was prototyping last year. Ended up being more useful for finding edge cases than actual gameplay feedback - the agent would do things no human would ever try, like walking into walls repeatedly or hoarding useless items. Still caught a bunch of bugs I never would have found otherwise.

  • morkalork 26 minutes ago

    Congrats on your Seventh Sally!

  • boxed 5 hours ago

    You should have a screenshot.

    • jdboyd 3 hours ago

      There is a screenshot in the README, and according to the github timestamp, the project hasn't been changed since you write this to add such a screen shot.

      Search for the section labeled: Visual Demo

      • Tiberium 18 minutes ago

        It seems like it was added by an LLM since it says "This is a simplified snapshot to show the general layout."

        Notice how it says "simplified snapshot","general layout". I don't think this is the actual representation of how the game looks like :)

      • agumonkey 2 hours ago

        I thought it was a ssh key fingerprint at first

      • PurpleRamen 41 minutes ago

        Is this technically a screenshot? I mean its text, not a picture, so more of an output-example.