Comments on: Excel-ent 3D Engines

By: StolenName

StolenName — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 13:19:58 +0000

Watcha doing in Romania?

Checking out the new Tom Clancy game?

Let us know how it goes!

By: Lu-Tze

Lu-Tze — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 09:57:20 +0000

I did pretty much the same thing 5 years ago, including using sheet swapping to emulate back buffer drawing.

By: Tak

Tak — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 19:22:58 +0000

@Ian
I feel your pain. Only in my case it’d be the sales reps. And they would have promised the customer we could make it do anything and everything they want in Excel, and give us two weeks to deliver.

*kicks non-IT people making decisions for IT*

By: Masked Dave

Masked Dave — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 18:22:53 +0000

Using Excel for game engines is apparently not a new idea by any means.

By: Ian

Ian — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 02:26:34 +0000

All I know is that this looks like the sort of thing some genius in Finance comes up with one afternoon, and three years later I’m the poor sod from Development that has to go and fix it, lest the company goes down the pan.

Bloody Excel. Grumble.

By: Stew

Stew — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 00:05:49 +0000

I’d thought of doing the same when I was a bank’s VBA wonk.

But when describing mine, I wouldn’t stoop to propagating the worthless and foolish lie about DVORAK keyboards. Elitists wouldn’t be so bad if their preferences had any basis in fact rather than rumour and ancedote.

By: Sucram

Sucram — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 22:38:23 +0000

There's actually an MSDN article titled Animating Objects in Excel 2007 Using the 3-D Animation Engine And there are many excel games , Pacman in Excel is particularly impressive.

By: Nick

Nick — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 21:38:54 +0000

“I bet you could make a game out of an excel spreadsheet”

You can, it’s called Football Manager.

*hides*

By: RichPowers

RichPowers — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 20:56:48 +0000

My physics professor used Excel to create demo videos of magnetic fields, distortion of spacetime by massive objects, nuclear reactions, etc.

He was a terrible teacher, but his talent with Excel was amazing.

But I always wondered why Excel instead of another rendering program…

By: Lunaran

Lunaran — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 20:14:21 +0000

I bet you could make a game out of an excel spreadsheet. 3D rendering aside, just craft some network of expressions that manipulate values from other cells, and give the player an end goal (like flip all the cells to red).

I’m not going to do it, though.

By: Jujo

Jujo — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 19:52:54 +0000

This seems like the grown-up version of the games we used to have on our graphing calculators

By: Seniath

Seniath — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 19:35:06 +0000

I think the real question is; why not? If the internets have taught me one thing, it is that people will try anything regardless of need, taste or reason.

I toyed with the idea of reading this, having a basic understanding of OpenGL, but my brain quickly melted.