Introducing myself - F-19 remake
Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Beginners Area/Introducing myself - F-19 remake
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| Hello, my name is Mark and I'm intending to make this and the other B3D-related boards my new home for the next several years. Quick background... I'm a long-time VB programmer (v3 - 6), having written a couple of large apps for AutoCAD LT (3.1 - 2002). Now that I'm mostly retired, I'm getting my feet wet with 3D game development to make my dream game, an updated (although not necessarily modern) remake of Microprose's F-19 Stealth Fighter (a combat flight sim from 1988). I started writing a Game Design Document here... http://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/3638115/Retro_Flight_Simulator_F_19_Ga.html#Post3638115 ...which I still need to complete. I'm also learning C++ programming on the side (VC6). My reasons for choosing Blitz3D (w/IDEal once I outgrow the default IDE) are: A. I'm comfortable with BASIC. B. I'm keeping a retro look and feel to my game (DX7 is more than capable for my needs). C. I still prefer developing in Windows 2000 (although Win7 is fine for posting and playing). Another reason I choose B3D over newer game makers was the availability of a printed manual (not bad for $20.00, IMO). I just finished the manual tutorials and I'm about to start on some others. Now if only I had waited a couple of months to purchase B3D for the price drop. :) Nah, I'm very pleased with B3D so far if just for teaching me what a game really is, and as long as these support boards stay open I think B3D will work out perfectly for me. So I'm off to do a lot of board reading and if I have any questions I can't find on my own I'll ask. |
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| Hasn't been a decent combat flight sim for years. Was my favourite genre years ago and you cannot beat Bob Dinnerman's F/A-18 Interceptor. |
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| My Siatek X-52 twist started spiking about the same time I went into bi-focals, which was pretty much the end of Falcon 4 for me. IMO, EF2000 (1995) was the pinnacle of flight sims, neither arcade nor hardcore, a perfect balance with awesome campaign gameplay. I still play it today. |
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| The age disparity in these forums is something to be marveled at. We have access to a lot of different experiences, views and interests. Welcome, hope you can get your stuff out of paper - and your questions in order. Blitz3D is definitely a great choice when you need fun productivity. Despite the high-level language and low-specs support, you can do great stuff with it: as with any other game engine, what matters is the quality of the content you use (graphics, audio, narrative and logic). |
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| I started writing a Game Design Document I like you already. |
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| I like you already. Likewise. :) I'm learning a lot from your posts Yasha, in fact as I type this I'm printing out a couple of PDF books that I believe you linked to somewhere on these boards (i.e. Applied Object-Based Programming with Blitz3D). I'll be reading back posts and working tutorials for a while yet. The age disparity in these forums is something to be marveled at. Kryzon, my saying "I'm mostly retired" was probably a poor choice of words and possibly misleading as I'm not quite 50 yet. :) I had been taking care of my elderly mother-in-law w/Alzheimers, but now I've been given the opportunity (time and support) to try something new. Maybe I'm going through a mid-life crises, but what I really want to do is to develop flight sims similar to the ones I enjoyed in DOS. Those sims had a good balance of realism vs. game-play IMO, with realistic load-outs, fuel management, taxiing and landing, etc. but also with cut-scenes and a story-line, and without a lot of cockpit button pushing. They just need a little upgrading in screen resolution, a few more polys and some texturing, IMO. This being my first game attempt will be more of a full-time hobby. I start college next fall (CS w/game design) so I'll be trying to complete as much of my game as possible before then. I'm using the game as a catalyst to become familiar with some of the subjects I'll be studying (can't hurt, plus high school math was a long time ago). Apologies for rambling, I just wanted to let the powers-that-be here know there's another active user of Blitz3D in this world, so please keep the support going. Thanks. Last edited 2012 Last edited 2012 |
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| Any status updates on this? I remember playing this game back in the day on my Packard Bell. F-18 hornet was another favorite of mine. Currently I'm a student at Keiser University studying game design. We are using software called the UDK (Unreal Development Kit) for our school projects, but after a few C++ classes I think Blitz 3d will workout great for prototyping my future game project. I'm amazed that you can have a basic 3d engine up and running in less than 300 lines of code! If you need any help with 3d models or textures I'd be happy to help. Windows 2000 was a great OS. I recently switched back to XP and a brand spanking new IBM CRT for my development needs. I'm shocked how much better the contrast and hues are versus a LCD. :D Last edited 2012 |
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| Hello, NostalgicAlgorithms. I'll probably be in lurking/study mode for at least another month, I didn't realize game development was so complex nor that my programming skills were so inadequate. ~20 years of VB (3-6) does not a programmer make, I think I've learned more about basic programming with beginner's books on C and C++ in the last 6 months than I ever knew with VB. I knew nothing of pointers, linked-lists, by-val vs. by-ref, and most importantly in VB I never learned to use Types or even Arrays. I didn't even know the fundamentals of memory usage (cache/stack) or declaring proper variable types. And I don't blame VB's accessibility for my lack of knowledge, I'm also learning you can go deep even with VB6 if you want to (and now I do). So that's currently where I'm at (no progress to show yet), but I'm in this for the long haul. I appreciate Microsoft's continued support for VB6... http://vb6zone.blogspot.com/2011/09/vb6-on-windows-8.html http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/ms788708 ...and hope Blitz3D support also continues, if just for compatibility (with reasonable workarounds if necessary). I can't imagine any other 3D game engine being so...comfortable. Not to mention the thorough references (including softcover Manual), included samples and tutorials, and hundreds of pages of knowledge on these boards (much of it you can copy/paste). As a whole I think the positives of B3D still outweigh the negatives of being outdated/single-platform/non-OOP, especially for a beginner like myself who needs a well-documented mature game engine to get started with. I agree w/CRTs having a better contrast, some older games I play actually look better than on my LCDs. |
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| I might be talking toot here (I have no experience of VB6, "before my time"), but if you're going to stick with VB as well, why not ditch VB6 and upgrade to VB.NET? VB.NET is basically just C# but made to look like BASIC, so you get all the features of the flagship CLR language while sticking with vaguely familiar syntax. I say this because if you never learned to use all of VB6's more interesting features... well, why bother with their subtle intricacies now? You can jump straight to a language with better support for that sort of thing! Last edited 2012 |
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Even with my limited programming knowledge (which is improving every day now), I was still able to make a couple of decent large commercial VB6 apps for AutoCAD LT (discontinued)... A self-extracting Lotus Screen Cam video from 2001 (not a commercial...it's all long-time discontinued, never to return)... http://198.65.10.229/DID/Temp/LTS_DEMO.EXE As well as several free-ware flight-sim tools for DID's Total Air War...     I've always used CodeSmart, a very sophisticated tool for the VB6 IDE... http://www.axtools.com/products-codesmart-vb6.php ...and I hope they help to keep VB6 current and vibrant. BTW, CodeSmart has a nice code analyzing feature and normally I follow its recommendations so my code is probably not TOO ugly. :) I just didn't understand why or even what I was doing sometimes, I just followed the recommendations. It's nice now learning what I'm actually doing! ++++++++++ The reason I've posted the above (and there's a LOT more I haven't posted) is to show you that I have a lot invested in VB6, and more than just code, also books and software (although admittedly I'm just now getting to the deeper stuff). It just wasn't feasible for me to port (mostly a re-write) my projects to .NET, too many years of fine-tuning plus the first version of VB.NET didn't impress me with its bloat and lack of features (i.e. no Edit and Continue), And then there's the matter of trust. Not to be so dramatic but I kinda feel abandoned by Microsoft (and so do some others) for not providing a reasonable upgrade for my VB6 projects. If I were to program for .NET (which I won't...EVER), I'd use C# anyway vs. a VB-like hack job. Funny, the .NET folks were sweating it out not too long ago as MS was promoting HTML5 and JavaScript for Win8 Metro apps, while not saying much about .NET. I can't blame them with that track record, just a matter of time before .NET code is also rendered obsolete. And look at some of the recent decisions by MS regarding VS2012: GUI that's Metro (or whatever it's called now) ugly with a flat washed-out look that's hard to see, and no longer being able to create desktop apps with the free Express versions. Ok, after much backlash both of those issues were rectified, the former decision reversed and the later solved by a new color scheme. But VS2012 still ships with a version of the NET framework that won't be supported by WinXP (NET 4.5). With VB6 and B3D I can write for Win95 - Win8, which should cover every Windows box out there! And since VB6 directly supports the DirectX 7 SDK, I can make my in-house tools in VB6 with the same DirectX version as B3D. Also, I like how Rob Hutchinson uses a VB6 front-end for SkyPlateau in the samples, I do the same with my AutoCAD LT and TAW programs above. I bet that can be expanded upon big-time, maybe not as pretty as Sprite Candy but that's ok, my game is supposed to be DOS retro so a 3D GUI isn't necessary. Sorry about the length of this post, I guess the bottom line is that I don't trust MS to invest again in another of its proprietary programming languages and I like that both VB6 and B3D are no longer moving targets (other than compatibility upgrades). All I have to worry about are future Windows but hopefully no time soon. Last edited 2012 |
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| I just try to understand with google translator ... I learned a lot of added Yasha ... Greetings. |
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| Everything Microsoft is such a double edged sword. You can count on what you program now to be unsupported within a few years. I remember my highschool was still teaching VB6 back in 2002? After spending a month with the MFC. (BTW, it's insane to try and teach or learn without even a basic understanding of Windows API) I can easily see why people still prefer VB6 over such a tool. Xp is by far the best OS that Microsoft ever put out. By using software such as a ramlink along with the physical address extension turned on (memory) you can get around the 4gb limit. I love it when I show people that my old Dualcore can smoke their latest hardware in terms of boot up speed and response time. My logic is that I will only upgrade to newer hardware/software when my current systems fail to do something I need them too. :) Last edited 2012 |
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