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The best QBasic game ever?

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41–50 of 102 posts

Re: The best QBasic game ever?

#41
post #24

Hah, reminds me of back in my grade 8th grade (equivalent - ~13 years old?) 'typing' class (circa 1995) - a friend made a 3d engine in QBasic that let you fly a wireframe spaceship around. It was pretty amazing, all things considered.

A friend of mine also made a 3d engine with QBasic that was a racing game when we were in 9th or 10th grade. I remember as he was developing it he was referring to a trigonometry book for a class that he hadn't yet taken. It was totally ridiculous and awesome.

Re: The best QBasic game ever?

#42
I think Gorrila's was the ultimate Qbasic game. It was "Scorched Earth" before Scorched Earth was a game.

I learned programming by turning Gorrila's in to a game with buildings that moved every turn, and changing the graphics.

Re: The best QBasic game ever?

#43
post #37
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, thank you. He is NOT using QBasic, it's QB64. He gets instant access to some pretty sweet functionality that was never in QBasic. Transparent PNG support, resolutions with more than 16 colors above 320x200, double buffering, TCP/IP, and the list goes on. Regardless, this guy is getting some awesome press with the QBasic thing. If you want to make money with games, it's all about the marketing. I'll give him a li…

QB64 also has multidimensional arrays, functions, while loops, "user defined types" (structs) ... apart from the lack of pointers, it's not all that far from C or Pascal once you ignore the syntactic sugar. (Or as pg calls it, "Algol with a funny hat".) Not to downplay his achievement - I'm sure making the game was a lot of work either way ... but implementing it in Basic doesn't seem especially praiseworthy.

Yeah QBASIC has multidimensional arrays, functions, while loops, structs. But I agree with your point, QBASIC is pretty much like C or Pascal without pointers.

Re: The best QBasic game ever?

#44
I learned how to program by reading through the code for qbasic gorillas (the game in the video in the article) back when I was a wee lad. Therefore, gorillas is the best game ever to me.

That said, qbasic was maybe not a best first language - I became a much better programmer when I learned C++ years later. Still, I really really appreciate that as a young child I had access to a fun game with the source code revealed. It changed my life.

Re: The best QBasic game ever?

#45
post #10

This is very, very cool. Speaking as someone who also wrote QBASIC games as a child, this evokes sharp pangs of nostalgia. I happen to have an old QBASIC book (pub 1993) next to me, and was skimming through it shortly before coming across this article. Random file I/O : OPEN filename$ FOR RANDOM AS [#]filenumber LEN=recordlength The book then goes on to provide helpful ways to guesstimate at the record length of a fi…

Just realised, same indentation and no-end-character rules as python :) Although I've been writing qbasic back in the days and now writing python for fun, I've never realized this before...

It's not white-space sensitive; "FOR" is the start of the loop, and "NEXT p" is something approximating the end (a goto or sorts).

Re: The best QBasic game ever?

#47
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wouldn't according to this: >Black Annex requires at least a 2.6GHz processor due to the scope of the project and the unoptimized multi-dimensional arrays.

And its RAM requirement exceeds what I had in my PC in 1991, by a factor of 1024.

My phone exceeds what I had in my PC in 1993... I wonder if this game will run on Android in DOSBox?

Re: The best QBasic game ever?

#48
post #46

He has a blog: http://www.manfightdragon.com You can see a video from there with some actual code: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2nBge7wq6c It actually doesn't seem that bad of an environment, which is a reminder that we haven't gotten that far with programming since the QBasic days...

My girlfriend just told me that "this looks like something my cousin did" ... it turns out the guy is her cousin. Small world.

Re: The best QBasic game ever?

#49
post #37
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, thank you. He is NOT using QBasic, it's QB64. He gets instant access to some pretty sweet functionality that was never in QBasic. Transparent PNG support, resolutions with more than 16 colors above 320x200, double buffering, TCP/IP, and the list goes on. Regardless, this guy is getting some awesome press with the QBasic thing. If you want to make money with games, it's all about the marketing. I'll give him a li…

QB64 also has multidimensional arrays, functions, while loops, "user defined types" (structs) ... apart from the lack of pointers, it's not all that far from C or Pascal once you ignore the syntactic sugar. (Or as pg calls it, "Algol with a funny hat".) Not to downplay his achievement - I'm sure making the game was a lot of work either way ... but implementing it in Basic doesn't seem especially praiseworthy.

QBASIC allows for functions (as well as subroutines), looping (while, for, do-while), structs (type) as well as multidimensional arrays. That said, all I really remember from my QBASIC days is abusing the crap out of GOTO.

Apparently QB64 can directly access C header files as well as Windows DLLs [1], although I don't think the author used any external modules. The source is described as being a solid monolithic block of 12k lines worth of BASIC, which in and of itself is fairly throwback-worthy.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QB64

edit : checked an old QBASIC manual to confirm whether or not multidimensional arrays (2+) were supported

    DIM cube(3,5,4)
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