There are many popular 3D game engines, such as “Source (used in Half Life 2), Unreal Engine (Unreal Tournament), idTech 4 (Doom 3), CryENGINE2 (Crysis) or Clever’s Paradox engine.” However, Microsoft’s Excel could be a fresh and good 3D game engine. Generally used only as an office tool, Excel has been highly underestimated as a game graphic engine.

First of all, Excel’s arithmetic ability is not restricted to four basic functions, but greatly extended to trigonometric functions and matrix operations, which are essential to game graphic engines. Only sparing a portion of screen, programmers can enjoy complicated calculations easily and elegantly. Especially, its feature to hide complex equations inside a cell and show only the result helps programmers

Excel also has its graphic rendering systems, called ECG(Excel-native Cell Graphics) and Office-level Graphics Abstraction Layer (OGAL). Many would be wondering what ECG is. It’s literally “cell graphics.” For visualization, you can customize colors of some cells in the Excel. Right! You can create any pictures you want with this. Remember two things:

1. In Excel, you can modify the size of a cell.
2. Excel has total 255 * 65535 = 16711425 cells.

If you think a cell as a ‘pixel,’ of a computer, you can create a 16.7 million of real high-resolution graphic, which no personal computer has attempted so far.
Since ECG is devoid of some necessary features of graphics (for example, line drawing), OGAL could be used as the alternate. With this, you can draw chars and graphs and all kinds of shapes. Moreover, Excel inherently supports layers so that you can use both of ECG and OGAL at the same time, mostly ECG as background and OGAL as objects.

Excel also breaks the traditional concept of ’sequential’ programming. While most programming languages use top-down approach, where you should read the code from top to the bottom, Excel has 2-dimensional code, where you can read the code from lest-to right, top-to bottom, or vice versa, in any direction you want! This feature respects programmer’s freedom and helps creativity.

Lastly, Excel ‘excells’ other programming languages in terms of quick debugging. As Excel refreshes its cells on every modification, a slight change of one variable immediately affects others, and programmers can see the overview of codes. This is very useful in debugging. You don’t have to go through tedious steps of changing-saving-compiling-building-launching-and again debugging. With Excel, it’s just two steps: changing-debugging.

P.S. This is supposed to be humorous. Please don’t take the post literally.

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