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QB Express #15 Now Available!

Posted: Thu Nov 03, 2005 3:23 am
by Pete
<p><strong>QB Express #15 Now Available!</strong> -- Posted by <a href="mailto:pberg1@ithaca.edu">Pete</a> on November 3, 2005<br>
The <a href="http://www.petesqbsite.com/sections/exp ... l">OCTOBER issue</a> of QB Express has finally been released! Sure it may be November already, but who is really keeping track? Besides, by delaying this issue for so long, it coincidentally was released on the birthday of Roseanne Barr and Charles Bronson!
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<br>Anyway, this month we've got a great issue, packed full of more QB and FB goodness than you can handle. Lachie Dazdarian searches for the unknown and finds Madmix Game by Enrique Huerta; he also reviews The Griffon Legend; Matt2Jones theorizes on Game Production; Rocket Boy presents an article called "Pirates of QB (Starting the QBasic GUI Community)"; Seb McClouth fills us in on Qbinux; Horse Humor and BBY the QBasic Maniac comics return; I take a look at Cadisman in the gallery; and mennonite delivers his last ever rant for QB Express.
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<br>Tutorials this month include two articles on GUI Design by MystikShadows, a look at "Group AI" by Jonathon Wallace, Part 2 of "C For the Basic Programmer" by The Awakened, a tutorial by Nathan1993, and Part 4 of MystikShadows' series on Database Design.
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<br>So what are you waiting for? Check it out in <a href="http://www.petesqbsite.com/sections/exp ... x.html">QB Express #15!</a></p>

Posted: Thu Nov 03, 2005 2:58 pm
by {Nathan}
thank god pete! i was gonna keel over in eagerness!!!

hmm... "a tutorial by Nathan1993'

heh... its much more than just a tutorial. its a 3 in one.

good job! now, off to read!

Posted: Thu Nov 03, 2005 4:39 pm
by lurah-
Great to have it here finally :wink: :lol:

That certain letter/article combination was something that mostlikely makes some "noice" on whole community soon.

Good Pete quality in all ways :D

Posted: Thu Nov 03, 2005 5:04 pm
by Kyle
Nice one :D

Posted: Thu Nov 03, 2005 7:36 pm
by Nodtveidt
Hey Pete, thanks for mentioning our child :D but her name's Rhianna, not Rhiannon! :D We were going to name her Rhiannon but Rhianna sounded better with her middle name, which is Aracelis. :D

Posted: Fri Nov 04, 2005 12:02 am
by lurah-
Rhianna Arecelis 8)
Wish you all the best. :)

Posted: Fri Nov 04, 2005 12:27 am
by Pete
Oops, sorry about that, Nek. I'll fix it!

Posted: Fri Nov 04, 2005 9:25 am
by {Nathan}
??? PETE? My name isnt on the contributer's list... why? WHY DO YOU DO THIS TO ME!

edit: thx man! hehe... now, back to... uhh... i need to get a life.

Posted: Fri Nov 04, 2005 3:39 pm
by Rattrapmax6
:wink: Nice issue once agian....
Nathan1993 wrote:??? PETE? My name isnt on the contributer's list... why? WHY DO YOU DO THIS TO ME!
:lol:

Posted: Fri Nov 04, 2005 5:16 pm
by The Awakened
Here's my thoughts on this month's article:

Not sure what to say about mennonite's email, only that I agree with Pete, for the most part, with the whole RTFM thing. I think it's completely reasonable for someone to get that response. All it takes is a quick Google search and a poke through the tutorials around. Now, there's some things where you go to search for them and it's tough to know where to start as far as a search string. Anyway...

Matt2Jones, I really enjoyed your article on creating more professional games. Interestingly enough, Mysterious Song was the first game I thought of when you started talking about title screens. :)

Both comics were good. :)

Nathan1993's little thing on compression was interesting. I never even thought of doing something like that... although it seems like it could be pretty damn slow for large files.

Let me know how my article was, if it caught your interest at all.

Posted: Fri Nov 04, 2005 7:54 pm
by MystikShadows
I for one really enjoyed your C++ part 2 of the series. I like the way you explain things, everything seems very clear to me he way you put it. :-).

Posted: Fri Nov 04, 2005 10:39 pm
by The Awakened
Heh, thanks. I'm actually thinking of re-writing them to be a little more structured than the original ones. I'm not sure if I'll be able to do part 3 this month... but I'm not gonna say "no" for sure. :) I'm just really getting into Rel's 3D tutorials, and, quite honestly, it's been taking up much of my free time.

Posted: Sat Nov 05, 2005 2:32 pm
by {Nathan}
The Awakened wrote:Nathan1993's little thing on compression was interesting. I never even thought of doing something like that... although it seems like it could be pretty damn slow for large files.
Slow, but really good if you really spent a lot of time and you needed to compress a lot of files. Like, if you had 1 gigabyte of stuff you needed to put onto a CD, sure, it would take a LONG time, but it would really compress it if you did it for each file (EG have a master un-compression file, and have that take account for each file).

Posted: Sat Nov 05, 2005 7:40 pm
by moneo
Nathan1993 wrote:
The Awakened wrote:Nathan1993's little thing on compression was interesting. I never even thought of doing something like that... although it seems like it could be pretty damn slow for large files.
Slow, but really good if you really spent a lot of time and you needed to compress a lot of files. Like, if you had 1 gigabyte of stuff you needed to put onto a CD, sure, it would take a LONG time, but it would really compress it if you did it for each file (EG have a master un-compression file, and have that take account for each file).
Is it slow due to the compression logic, or could it be slow because of the I/O involved?

If you think that the I/O is contributing to it being slow, than consider adding a "LEN =" statement to the OPEN statements of the input and output files. Without the "LEN =", the buffer size will default to 256 bytes, which for a large file means many, many accesses to the disk. Increase the buffer size with "LEN =" and you will appreciate much faster file I/O.

With a bigger buffer, you will transfer larger blocks of data on every access to the disk, with fewer time-consuming, physical accesses to the hard disk or CD.
(Thanks to Ethan Winer)
*****

Posted: Sat Nov 05, 2005 7:48 pm
by {Nathan}
Huh? I just ment slow becuase it might take a while to detect what you need to compress... so yeah, the IO really.

Posted: Sat Nov 05, 2005 10:48 pm
by The Awakened
moneo: You'd need to read the article to understand. I'd say the compression logic moreso than the IO transfers would take time.

I'm sitting here stumped as to how to make it a fairly efficient process. I'm at a friend's place, and he doesn't code, let alone have FB, so I can't really just code something up... I'm heading back home in a few hours, I'll have to try something then.

Posted: Sun Nov 06, 2005 12:34 pm
by {Nathan}
Yeah, thats the main reason why I didnt post any code, it would all just have to be guess and check, from what I can think of.