QBasic game programming

#1

Post by StylifyYourBlog » Mon, Jan 19, 2015, 2:55 AM UTC

QBasic game programming
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Re: QBasic game programming

#2

Post by neandrake » Mon, Jan 19, 2015, 3:27 AM UTC

In the late 90's there were several great QBasic communities (NeoZones was one I would frequent the most). I think these more than the fondness of the language/IDE were what kept me interested in learning software. Most of the communities seemed to die along with popularity of the language in the early 2000's.

Re: QBasic game programming

#3

Post by aabajian » Mon, Jan 19, 2015, 3:29 AM UTC

This is fantastic. My first game was in GW-BASIC, but I quickly upgraded once I discovered QBasic on DOS 6.22. I also loved the MS-DOS Shell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_Shell) found on the supplemental disk of v6.22. It felt like multitasking...but wasn't.

Re: QBasic game programming

#4

Post by dhotson » Mon, Jan 19, 2015, 3:52 AM UTC

neandrake wrote: post #2

In the late 90's there were several great QBasic communities (NeoZones was one I would frequent the most). I think these more than the fondness of the language/IDE were what kept me interested in learning software. Most of the communities seemed to die along with popularity of the language in the early 2000's.

Oh wow.. the community is still going: http://www.neobasic.net/

Marcade, Alias, Chaoticmass, Sciolizer.. any of you guys hang out here? :)

Re: QBasic game programming

#5

Post by petercooper » Mon, Jan 19, 2015, 3:58 AM UTC

It basically has zero value now, but perhaps my only claim to "fame" in the 90s was writing the first (at least popularly known) raycaster in QBasic which then spawned a ton of clones (the comp.lang.basic.misc community was strong then). It was absolutely hideous and naive but getting credited in far smarter people's larger creations as their inspiration was an eye opener for me :-) (And a feat I have not repeated, alas!)

http://home.kpn.nl/nebula/articfls%5Carticle1.html http://www.o-bizz.de/qbdown/qbcom/files/txtreng.bas

Re: QBasic game programming

#6

Post by FrankenPC » Mon, Jan 19, 2015, 4:40 AM UTC

Great memories. It inspires me to locate an old DOS version of Turbo Pascal. TP was my absolute favorite IDE in the DOS days.

Re: QBasic game programming

#7

Post by dhotson » Mon, Jan 19, 2015, 6:26 AM UTC

I managed to dig up one of my old 3d demo projects:

Source: https://gist.github.com/dhotson/686036fb771fbbca8c48

Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/4fpaYtO.png

.. it's not as embarrassing as I expected. :)

Re: QBasic game programming

#8

Post by kyriakos » Mon, Jan 19, 2015, 6:50 AM UTC

I'm wondering what impact to future programmers the current state of programming will have. Back when i was using qbasic there were very few distractions, as a self taught programmer if you wanted to build something you had to figure out how to do it yourself. No frameworks, no google, no stackoverflow noise just a couple of libraries and infromation from a couple of books I had access to as a kid. I remember for my first PC I knew the purpose of every single file on its 21mb of hard disk, try doing that today..

Re: QBasic game programming

#9

Post by DSMan195276 » Mon, Jan 19, 2015, 7:18 AM UTC

Shout-out to QB64 - An attempt at a modern version/compiler for QBasic code, as well as updated features. I used to do a fair amount of programming in QB64, and the design of the language hampers it as a general-purpose language, it's a fun language for learning and writing in.

Re: QBasic game programming

#10

Post by andrewguenther » Mon, Jan 19, 2015, 7:49 AM UTC

I learned QBasic from a Boy Scout magazine when I was in 4th grade. It was a letter jumble game and my dad helped me on our old Windows 3.1 machine. Never looked back.