FPS.cob: A first person shooter in COBOL

We 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.

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”.

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.

https://github.com/icitry/FPS.cob/blob/main/fps.cob

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!