I tend to spend hours browsing Gopherholes and Phlogs, but I tend to lose track of where I am. So I implemented a navigation system that I have yet to see in any other Gopher client (or web, for that matter):
- Drill-down Columnar Navigation.
It is heavily inspired by Finder's own column navigation, so if you like that, you'll be at home.
In addition, it has other features that every modern browser should have:
- A tabbed interface
- An omnibar with search capabilities (Using Veronica-2)
- Files and folders view
- Inline image previews with zooming
- Caching
I have many more ideas to contribute back to the Gopher ecosystem without losing its essence (see the roadmap), so if you want to contribute, send ideas, share your opinions, or just show support, please let me know! I hope you like it!
Of course it's a matter of personal taste. But disclaimer, TFTD was indeed my first entry to the series. And yes, I hate the ship as well.
The atmosphere is absolutely terrifying. It really made me clutch for the life of my soldiers as if it was mine. It was unfair, but not without reason, as even today our submarine warfare would pale against T'Leth. So close yet so powerless.
The superb work on the graphics brings me deep into the abyss. Just look at how well the battle maps fade into the darkness. The various aliens are actually scary for once, and their shared past with the human species is realistic yet particularly disturbing. We all came from those same oceans, after all.
I already spoke about the music, but it really seals the deal.
I know this might sound it's all about the assets and the mood. But the game was already quite good, and TFTD gave that engine the content it deserved.
I will hazard a rough comparison – UFO Defense feels more like Starship Trooper, while TFTD is more like Alien. Intimate and downright scary.
OpenXCOM and OpenXCE fix almost all of TFTD's problems with tons of quality-of-life improvement, like the "bug hunt" mode which reveals the location of those pesky aliens when a play drags too long. Give it a spin if you didn't already!
Even greater than UFO Defense, in my opinion, was its expansion - Terror From the Deep.
It truly taught me that our oceans are so close, yet much farther than outer space can ever be. Looking at that lone blue globe in space always makes me feel so insignificant, so meaningless. Space is vast, but empty, and sterile. Down the abyss, not even light can shine to bless and purify.
The greatest contributor to that is certainly its soundtrack. With its unnerving, relentless low horns; harps hitting on the same two or three notes; there's a feeling of utter despair, hopelessness. A sense of doom, as aquanauts armed with teeny darts and harpoons grunt through the deaths of their colleagues, outmatched by opponents so unfairly superior, in the harshest environment on Earth. They couldn't have done a better job.
I have been working on a new "HD" soundtrack for TFTD that I plan to release as a mod for OpenXCOM (this article is great timing!). I am not finished yet, but you can listen to some of the tracks already (and download them if you wish):
The ability for clients to render the markup as they please is actually one of the most important features, and a stark distinction from HTML, which only has one correct way to render.
I exploit this in my Unnamed Gopher Client[0], a client for the predecessor of the Gemini protocol, where I render links in a familiar files/folder format:
I used a similar (but not identical) multi-column drill-down navigation technique in my Unnamed Gopher Client[0].
However, instead of coding my own scroll gestures, I delegated to CSS Scroll Snap, which works beautifully, even in complicated scrolling scenarios, and scrolls natively.
It's single player only unfortunately (yet) and the AI leaves quite a bit to be desired... But I'll get to it eventually!
Here are the instructions:
- You are always the red tank
- Left/right arrow changes the firing angle
- Up/down change the firing power
- Pressing SHIFT and/or ALT performs the above faster or slower
- Tab/shift-tab switches between weapons
- Spacebar fires
I employed a number of tricks. The ones I am particularly proud of are:
- The title screen, which uses the iconic old-school wavy text effect. To make this fast in Bash, I ended up precomputing the table of sin that determines the offset of each slice:
- The rendering system required to get all this to run a smooth, consistent 60fps on both linux and macs, without blocking key reading. It sends itself an ALRM signal trap to run the game loop in a co-process, much similarly to how it's usually done with `requestAnimationFrame`:
> he thought of using a space theme [...] and created initial bitmap images after the octopus-like aliens. Other alien designs were modeled after squids and crabs.
I find it funny how the thought goes to deep space, yet reaches so close to Earth.
