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foone
foone
@Foone 2 years, 10 months ago 2585 views

An interesting set of games that I've been vaguely interested in since I was a kid, after seeing one at a friend's house and never being able to find it again, was the BATTLES IN A DISTANT DESERT/BATTLES ON DISTANT PLANETS series.

 These are turn-based wargames for windows 3.x, sharing the same engine.
Battles in a Distant Desert is from 1992, and is based on the first Iraq war (Desert Storm)
and Battles on Distant Planets is from 1991, and takes place in SPACE!
I'm pretty sure this is the one I played as a kid.
They've got 3 options to play with:
* Player vs. Player
* Player vs. Computer
* Computer vs. Computer

So it's a 0-2 player game!
They also did a DOS strategy game called "STARDATE 2140.2: GALACTIC CONQUEST" in 1990, but it seems to be lost.
All the games share an experimental AI system based on neural networks.
There's also CRUSADE IN SPACE from 1993, which is on the internet archive but doesn't seem to work:
https://t.co/LsXXGlcxTD
There's WORLD WAR II BATTLES: NORMANDY from 1994, (which seems to be lost but I have some leads, so I'll keep looking), and finally LANDS OF SWORDS AND SORCERY, which was in development in 1995 but then halted so it could be revamped for Windows 95 (which never happened)
So those are the six shareware games from Glacier Edge:
Three we have, two missing, one incomplete and never released.
But who was Glacier Edge?
They were basically one person: Eric Dysband, of Glendale, CO. He was a freelance AI consultant working on a bunch of games.
He was a playtester on The Perfect General (1991) by White Wolf Productions.
and the lead developer on Enemy Nations (1996) by Windward Studios.
He programmed The War in Heaven (1999), a Christian FPS from Eternal Warriors/ValuSoft.
He was the AI programmer for NHRA Drag Racing 2 (2000)
His final game was Men of Valor (2004), a Medal of Valor spin-off game.
Sadly, he passed away on April 15, 2004, due to an aneurysm.
He also worked on the AI for Rebel Moon Revolution, which was supposed to be the third game in the Rebel Moon series, which was canceled before release.
There is footage from the demo version, showing the squad-based combat it was going to use.
It turns out the engine for War in Heaven is the same as Rebel Moon Revolution, too.
https://t.co/wbyeSOYZ0j
A correction: I misread what he was saying on Usenet, his games were trying to do AI WITHOUT a neural-network based approach.
He also made some commercial games under the Glacier Edge name:
PARACHUTES AT KANEV (1987) was a DOS wargame based on the Kanev board game, under contract for World Wide Wargames.
He also wrote a series of articles for Gamasutra on AI middleware:
https://t.co/i5lDxELoNb

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and it still has files on it. the newest date is January 1994.


It's a 21mb hard drive, with ~37k of bad sectors.

This fucker is never going to spin up again, so I better go find some serial cables and copy shit off now.


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It's a timer outlet, but you program it from your phone... but it's not wireless.


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I got it on sale.
probably because iphone dropped the headphone port and they had to get with the 21st century and make it bluetooth


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I'm watching these videos about the Georgia Phone Call and they're talking about if Dominion did any kind of weird hacks, and all I'm thinking is:

I need to get a voting machine.

Yeah, it turns out if you select the party vote option and toggle it Democrat-Republican-Democrat then tap the Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen three times, you'll trigger the Easter egg and you can play DOOM!

Set your location to California, vote no on Prop 22, party vote democrats and select the Green presidential campaign Howie Hawkins, then toggle Prop 22 to yes, then longpress "reset ballot" and you'll get rickrolled.

This is how my brain works. "the voting machines could be hacked! The president might be trying to steal the election! What should I do?

Oh yeah, get a screwdriver and make a voting machine play DOS games."

I wonder if they're still x86 based? The last time we had a big electronic voting scandal, of the they were... But now we're in the arm era.
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I think chrome is intentionally providing shitty user experience for the blocking of HTTP downloads on HTTPS pages, in order to push developers to fix it faster.

you click a HTTP download link on an HTTPS page and what happens? NOTHING. No error page, no pop-up saying "BLOCKED BECAUSE SECURITY", the browser is just like "did you click? I didn't notice"

it just sticks an error in the JS console.

which I'm sure everyone notices


BTW, this is probably going to get fixed soon, but as of Version 87.0.4280.141 (which seems to be latest) there's a bug which lets you bypass the block, most of the time.

Incognito mode.

Basically chrome won't let you download it because it has the context of you clicking it from a HTTPS page.
But it loses the context if you use the "open link in incognito window" option.
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