FPS.cob: A first person shooter in COBOL
github.comWe need to start putting guardrails on hn to not allow those esoteric projects to be published. Before ai, it was impressive that a person has that much passion and dedication to go down the rabbit hole, and it usually comes back with some cool anacdotes that are nice to read.
Today, it's shallow, emptied out of the content.
It's not impressive that Claude wrote it, it was impressive if you have written it, OP.
We need to start putting guardrails on hn to not allow those pointless comments complaining about usage of AI.
If you have nothing else to comment on then can you stop crying please?
We need to start putting guardrails on hn to not allow those pointless comments complaining about usage of peepee poop
Could you stop evacuating your bladder and bowels? Puuuuhfleas
Exactly. But the damage is done. I find nothing anyone does in tech impresses or interests me anymore. The only things that interest me are things I’d like to also do myself. I imagine it’s probably the same for a lot of other people.
Like OK someone vibecoded an FPS in COBOL or Pokémon emerald in a web browser with web assembly? Ok good for them, piss off karma farmer.
It would be nice to have screenshots. Also it’s just a single commit, did you use AI? Quoting the readme: “FPS.cob is what you get when you decide that game development is too easy nowadays”.
Submitted a PR: https://github.com/icitry/FPS.cob/pull/6/changes. You can see a screenshot at the link.
I hope for their sake that it's an agentic AI experiment.
Why the negativity?
If someone wants to have fun in COBOL, let them have fun in COBOL.
If it’s agentic fun, that’s cool. If it’s an interest in the language, that’s cool. It’s not like you have to have an ROI for a fun side project.
It’s also OK to be turned off by AI use in hobby projects and it is also OK to prefer disclosure of the use of AI in projects so I can make that choice.
As a few people have asked for screenshots, I spun it up. Here's a video of the basic gameplay: https://peterc.org/misc/fpscob.mp4 .. it's clunky, but it does play.
Looks like it outputs PPM and use ffplay as a display driver:
https://github.com/icitry/FPS.cob/blob/497867bb6827bcfc32d50...
You know what, that is some pretty readable code.. COBOL might have been on to something there. I've gotten so used to syntax soup this is refreshing.
I had to get into an old tcl program for work recently and had the same thought. I wouldn't necessarily pick it today but it was kind of nice in a way that's unfamiliar to me from modern development.
The tcl syntax is fine. And modern tcl is fine.
But tcl 7.x and before was a pure string-based language. Everything was essentially a eval(). People would hit syntax errors on production code.
Fun, painful times.
The flip side: the interpreter is super simple and fun to write.
Tcl is still entirely stringly typed. That's never changed.
There are under-the-hood optimisations to make it less insanely slow but that only affects performance.
Tcl is a cool hack (the interpret is simple to write) but it's insane to actually use it. I wish the EDA industry would realise that.
They should compile it to WASM and host it.
Doesn't run for me. Just I/O errors and quits.
Come on, we need screenshots!