Through the Interface

Mapping Zork inside AutoCAD – Part 1

I mostly despise jetlag but once in a while manage to harness it for something positive. I remember some great trips to Asia, waking up at strange times to experience the dawn, walking the streets and seeing everyday life starting up around me. These days I typically find jetlag to be a bit of a curse, but this weekend I ended up using it to tackle a fun challenge: generating maps for Z-machine games such as Zork inside AutoCAD. Something I mentioned in a recent blog post but was reminded of last Thursday while catching up with Christer Janson... Read more →

Playing Zork inside AutoCAD

The nostalgia is strong in this one. (In both this post and this blogger, in case you’re wondering.) It started with my 20th anniversary at Autodesk, but it got worse, last weekend, when I travelled to the UK to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the University of Kent (where I studied, back in the day, about halfway through its history). I’d coordinated with a couple of close friends, so we descended on Canterbury from Switzerland, Connecticut and Windsor, and joined a thousand or so alumni for a really fun, celebratory weekend, revisiting old haunts and sharing old memories. Doubling... Read more →

AutoCAD and Prince of Persia

Every so often I get hit by a wave of computing nostalgia. This weekend it was a veritable tsunami triggered by the discovery that a number of old MS-DOS games are available to play online in your browser, including the seminal Prince of Persia. This game has a strong connection with AutoCAD, for me, so today I’m blogging about that. I first started working with AutoCAD while I was still at high school – it must have been around 1989. After a successful (but mind-numbingly boring) summer project at a local manufacturing company, converting their old engineering calculation routines... Read more →

An update to Minesweeper for AutoCAD

Stephen Preston sent me an update to his minesweeper application, some time ago, and it’s been languishing in my inbox until today. Stephen has spent some time polishing the app, adding a more coherent architecture (or so he tells me). As I’m busy beavering away with the Kinect SDK, I thought I’d go ahead and post the code. Here is the updated, AutoCAD-specific command class: Imports Autodesk.AutoCAD.Runtime Imports Autodesk.AutoCAD.ApplicationServices Imports Autodesk.AutoCAD.DatabaseServices Imports Autodesk.AutoCAD.Geometry Imports Autodesk.AutoCAD.EditorInput Imports System Imports System.Collections.Generic ' This line is not mandatory, but improves loading performance Namespace Minesweeper Public Class MyCommands 'This is the... Read more →

Minesweeper in AutoCAD using .NET

Today’s post contains some fun code contributed by Stephen Preston which re-creates the Minesweeper video game inside AutoCAD. Stephen tells me it needs a bit of polishing, but the game is certainly playable. I’ve reformatted some of Stephen’s code to fit this blog. The implementation comprises two main files, which you can name as you wish. I’ve used the VS 2010 convention for line-breaks (which means you don’t need an underscore). If you’re using older versions of Visual Sudio or Visual Basic Express you may need to concatenate lines or insert underscores at the end of them. Here’s the... Read more →