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The best QBasic game ever?

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Re: The best QBasic game ever?

#81

Post by klipt »

laumars wrote: post #76
manfightdragon wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's compiled, not interpreted. You have no idea what I'm doing over here.

The compiled point was wrong, I'd already conceded that. But that doesn't mean I have no idea what what you're doing. I just wrongly assumed that the QB64 devs would just embed the .bas inside the PE as a resource file rather than going to the trouble of writing a compiler. Honestly, I'm impressed they bothered given the niche appeal of the IDE and number of other BASIC compilers on the market (FreeBASIC, PureBASIC,…

> Honestly, I'm impressed they bothered given the niche appeal of the IDE

It reminds me a bit of the freepascal project. Beautiful compiler, tons of extensions (including generics: http://wiki.freepascal.org/Generics), graphical RAD IDE (Lazarus) ... yet relatively few people use it because C++ does all of that and more. Ultimately, I guess syntactic preference isn't really enough of a justification for yet another compiled imperative OOP language...

Re: The best QBasic game ever?

#82

Post by laumars »

klipt wrote: post #81
laumars wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The compiled point was wrong, I'd already conceded that. But that doesn't mean I have no idea what what you're doing. I just wrongly assumed that the QB64 devs would just embed the .bas inside the PE as a resource file rather than going to the trouble of writing a compiler. Honestly, I'm impressed they bothered given the niche appeal of the IDE and number of other BASIC compilers on the market (FreeBASIC, PureBASIC,…

> Honestly, I'm impressed they bothered given the niche appeal of the IDE It reminds me a bit of the freepascal project. Beautiful compiler, tons of extensions (including generics: http://wiki.freepascal.org/Generics ), graphical RAD IDE (Lazarus) ... yet relatively few people use it because C++ does all of that and more. Ultimately, I guess syntactic preference isn't really enough of a justification for yet another…

I know exactly what you mean. I used to love Pascal back in the 90s so installed Lazarus a few months ago with the intention of writing a few Qt apps. I think I spent 10 minutes in there at the time, thought "this is fun", and have never touched it again since.

Re: The best QBasic game ever?

#83

Post by dhimes »

DanBC wrote: post #64
dpcan wrote: 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…

> used that tiny dos-box blue editor that comes with QB64 to code the entire game tho :) And had a screen at an EGA text resolution of 80 x 25 chars with each character being in a box of 9x14 pixels. (With pixels means 'dots on the screen'.) And saved the result on 5 1⁄4-inch or 3 1⁄2-inch discs. And fiddled about with FOSSIL drivers and kermit or Xmodem or Ymodem and ProcommPlus to upload the game to a BBS. At 9600…

At 9600 baud

Lucky bastard.

Re: The best QBasic game ever?

#84

Post by davexunit »

boyter wrote: post #20

I always thought that DarkDreads Mysterious Song was the most impressive QBasic game, http://darkdreams.rpgdx.net/downloads.html This looks like it might take the title though.

I loved Mysterious Song. It's a solid game. Whatever happened to DarkDread? He just disappeared.

Re: The best QBasic game ever?

#85

Post by bluedino »

DanBC wrote: post #64
dpcan wrote: 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…

> used that tiny dos-box blue editor that comes with QB64 to code the entire game tho :) And had a screen at an EGA text resolution of 80 x 25 chars with each character being in a box of 9x14 pixels. (With pixels means 'dots on the screen'.) And saved the result on 5 1⁄4-inch or 3 1⁄2-inch discs. And fiddled about with FOSSIL drivers and kermit or Xmodem or Ymodem and ProcommPlus to upload the game to a BBS. At 9600…

Running the editor with /h would give you 43 or 50 lines of text. Then use the green on black color scheme and you were a 4th grade hacker.

Re: The best QBasic game ever?

#86

Post by groovy2shoes »

laumars wrote: post #78
manfightdragon wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It uses whatismyip for a (pretty dumb) added function related to finding your WAN IP.

I know why it's using it. My point was firstly that it's odd (though not unforgivable) that the compiler links to those procedures even though my source .bas wasn't calling any networking APIs; and secondly that the sub-domain doesn't even exist for the DNS lookup to work: $ whois automation.whatismyip.com | head Whois Server Version 2.0 Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered with many differ…

> My point was firstly that it's odd (though not unforgivable) that the compiler links to those procedures even though my source .bas wasn't calling any networking APIs...

It's pretty common for compilers for niche languages to statically link the runtime library by default. Many think it eases distribution.

Re: The best QBasic game ever?

#87

Post by laumars »

groovy2shoes wrote: post #86
laumars wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know why it's using it. My point was firstly that it's odd (though not unforgivable) that the compiler links to those procedures even though my source .bas wasn't calling any networking APIs; and secondly that the sub-domain doesn't even exist for the DNS lookup to work: $ whois automation.whatismyip.com | head Whois Server Version 2.0 Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered with many differ…

> My point was firstly that it's odd (though not unforgivable) that the compiler links to those procedures even though my source .bas wasn't calling any networking APIs... It's pretty common for compilers for niche languages to statically link the runtime library by default. Many think it eases distribution.

Yes I know this (and it's not just compilers for niche languages that does this either). But again, that wasn't my point. My point was this:

1. it's statically compiling in libraries for APIs that aren't even being used (again, I know this is pretty common as well - it was more said as a side issue since I was already on the topic of it's runtime). But most importantly:

2. because automation.whatismyip.com DOES NOT EXIST. The API is broken because it calls a non-existent sub-domain name. The sub-domain has no DNS record. It does not ping nor curl because it's completely imaginary....and so on. (sorry for the flippancy of the post, but this is now the 3rd time I'm having to reiterate myself so I just want to be clear that everyone understands my point)

Re: The best QBasic game ever?

#88

Post by dpcx »

laumars wrote: post #87
groovy2shoes wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My point was firstly that it's odd (though not unforgivable) that the compiler links to those procedures even though my source .bas wasn't calling any networking APIs... It's pretty common for compilers for niche languages to statically link the runtime library by default. Many think it eases distribution.

Yes I know this (and it's not just compilers for niche languages that does this either). But again, that wasn't my point. My point was this: 1. it's statically compiling in libraries for APIs that aren't even being used (again, I know this is pretty common as well - it was more said as a side issue since I was already on the topic of it's runtime). But most importantly: 2. because automation.whatismyip.com DOES NOT E…

automation.whatismyip.com used to exist; it's what whatismyip.com suggested you use when making a large number of easily parseable requests. I assume since the redesign (read: monetization attempt) it's disappeared.

Re: The best QBasic game ever?

#89

Post by laumars »

dpcx wrote: post #88
laumars wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I know this (and it's not just compilers for niche languages that does this either). But again, that wasn't my point. My point was this: 1. it's statically compiling in libraries for APIs that aren't even being used (again, I know this is pretty common as well - it was more said as a side issue since I was already on the topic of it's runtime). But most importantly: 2. because automation.whatismyip.com DOES NOT E…

automation.whatismyip.com used to exist; it's what whatismyip.com suggested you use when making a large number of easily parseable requests. I assume since the redesign (read: monetization attempt) it's disappeared.

Honestly, I've never heard of automation.whatismyip.com until today. But after Googling around a but, it looks like they've only taken that domain offline two or three months ago. So I guess the QB64 devs haven't been made aware yet (or haven't had time to update their WAN IP library yet).

Re: The best QBasic game ever?

#90

Post by nollidge »

laumars wrote: post #69
manfightdragon wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the game's written in the QBASIC language but I certainly don't use QuickBASIC 4.5 or PDS to compile it.

Sorry to nitpick, but "QBasic" is an IDE (Just like QuickBASIC, which incidentally is the predecessor of QBasic). The language is just called "BASIC". Also you're not compiling anything. It's all interpreted at run time (which is why performance is dog slow).

No, QBasic is also a language variant. QBasic has functions, user-defined types, no line numbers, and a pretty big standard library that plain BASIC did not have.
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