QB Express: Issue #11

Letters

Letter From MystikShadows

Hi again Pete, I'm back as you might have noticed ;-). Not sure you wanna make a news item out of that though lol. But it's good to be back :-) finally. lol Come on, did you think i'd let a 10 day absence from the web stop me from having something to say here? LOL

First, I think you, once again, outdid yourself, you put QB Express #10 in a record time even if it was a big issue, I think you're developing some tricks of the trade so to speak cause QB Express is polishing itself with every single release. You sure know how to put your thoughts into words in such a way that we see and understand what you're talking about as clearly as you do ;-). that's quite a talent to have. The articles in #10 were great (no not just mine ;-)) everything in #10 was absolutely worth the read, even Anarky's apology ;-). Once again we can see people asking for what they want to see and that's good, shows again what I've been saying about FreeBasic users finding their niche and developing them and if they can't find information, they'll ask for it because they WANT to do their things. Good to see all that motivation running wild in the community. :-). I really enjoyed Na_th_an's "Teaching English to our computer" tutorial. Very well explained. I also Liked DrV's "The BASIC User's Guide to English and Grammar" as well. Made me question my own sentence formulation techniques a bit. :-). And since A.I. has always been a fascinating subject to me, "Artificial Intelligence, Real Intelligence and QBasic" by Robert Hambly really caught my attention :-). But I can honestly say that I learned something interesting out of everything I've read in #10 issue well cept for my own submissions ;-).

Second, to answer your reply :-). Ok, I'll shut up and accept that I'm a productive writer ;-). The reasons you mentionned are definitaly part of the reasons why I submitted the stuff I submitted. If someone is asking himself questions about what it's like out there in the commercial and professional software development field, they should get a good idea from my articles. The other main reason is that today, weather it's a game or a business application or a programming tool of any kind, users today expect more out the applications they use. They want that extra sense of stability. Today, INPUT A$ to get a string value from the user (or a MsgBox call) just don't cut it anymore, the text input should now be in a box, validated, formatted the way it needs to be shown, etc etc....They want attention to little details like that. They would rather pick a value from a list of values instead of just entering the values, and they "expect" the application to control itself properly even when things go terribly wrong. And yes, that goes for games as well as anything else that anyone would create. Of course in games like Quest for Opa Opa, where making mystakes as you discover what commands work is part of the excitement, so for those games, this does not apply except for that kick you out of the application part. But indeed, that's why I submit the kind of stuff I submit. If every reader of those articles can say (hey that's not a bad idea, and understand why it's good to go the extra mile in their games (like anything else) then I'll be happy with that :-). Even if they never let me know lol. Attention to detail is really what it's all about. :-).

Third, I feel responsible for alot of what happened on QBasicNews, I started by suggesting some of what I thought were good ideas and I kinda blew up a bit on another post, basically bluntly telling them they need to go back to forum management 101 classes or something. I'm not gonna repeat those ideas or that dreaded post. But I will say this, the way the board was handled showed me the reason why my suggestions were utterly ignored. But that's ok, at first all I wanted to do was help them out since I've managed forums that had huge amounts of members and Iv'e hosted chatrooms too (and in chat rooms, my suggestion really helped me make my rooms as successful as they could get :-)), until I found out they didn't want any help. I'm probably the most frequent visitor of QBasicNews and still am today (I'm glad it's still there). But that board has 1600 plus members, and at that amount, the ideas and suggestions I gave start to become quite necessary to keep the board healty and alive. So I'd like to take the oppurtunity here to publically apologize for the role I played in the closing of their forums. Even with that post, I didn't expect that to happen but it did and I feel I needed to apologize for that to the admins and mods at the time and to the other 1600+ members. So now that it's back online, I have no complaints and I hope it stays online for many decades to come :-).

Fourth, GUI seems to be the new old thing dare I say. People want to know about it how to make it, how to make sure it's good and efficient, basically how to not fall in the same holes Microsoft did when they created windows ;-). I for one welcome the idea of new GUIs with open arms. Who knows maybe I'll take a crack at it, not now though ;-). But the idea of having new GUIs to look at and learn from is quite important. It's one of the best subjects (right after games :-) where programmers can foster their creativity into a work of art without any limits imposed by the hardware it is executed on. I can't wait to see what people will create. :-). I always say that there's so many things yet to be created. Today still companies and people are creating things that they don't want to do manually, we didn't even begin to touch all things that the computer can do that we can't do. Plenty of room for new ideas and concepts to get created :-) and with the impressive benchmarks I'm seeing from freebasic it looks like it is "the" best language to use :-). I'll be looking for new things to see :-).

Fifth, I have to throw a word of encouragement to Mr. Adigun A. Polack here. I wasn't there back then...but I gotta admire his perseverance and determination to trying to make something worth doing for the QMunity. 3 failed attempts and still he rises from the ashes and gives the community yet another attempt (a good one from what I'm seeing) at making sure the community is being kept busy and active :-). There isn't too many people with that kind of perseverance and I'm sure alot of people would have stopped at 2 failed attempts, but he didn't, and that's the kind of determinationa nd motivate to contribute to the community that deserves, in my opinion, to not go unnoticed. I really hope this one is a big success for him. To me, he deserves such a success, he's been working hard at it and deserves to reap what he has sewn (DrV, this right too? ;-) ) DrV doesn't know it, but I now have a new English Mentor/spell checker and that is DrV...lol.

Finally, well what can I say. QB Express is quickly becoming my "encyclopedia britannica" (DrV is that right? lol) of programming of all types and active creativity at it's best. And I can see the evolution of everything (the magazine, the contributors AND the readers) with every release, no wonder I'm so hooked lol, can't get too much of a good thing I always say. The magazine in it's first issue was a field test, you could see that things were put in there just to see if they would work and well, obviously, they worked just fine ;-). After that, we could notice that things were changing, parts were added, subjects were varying and slowly, QB Express became what we can all enjoy and learn from today. It's been an awesome first 10 issues and I'm looking forward to many 10s of issues to come. :-). I tip my hat to you Pete and all the contributors...but also to all the community....it's amazing to see everything that's going on in the community and I can't wait to see more. :-). Ooops there's that "Johnny 5 is alive" mode kicking in again ;-). Where's Issue #11 when ya need it? LOL.

Keep up the awesome work man.

MystikShadows

Stephane Richard

As always, I've got to thank you for all the compliments -- seriously man, you're spoiling me! But you're right, QB Express is really starting to hit a groove. For the first few issues, I had to keep on begging people to write articles...I had to send out reminders every few days...I had to dig to find content and contributors. Now, QB Express is at the point where it's almost running itself -- people come to me with great ideas for articles, and then they go out and write them. The content just comes rolling in. After I add a healthy dose of my own stuff and put it all together, we've got ourselves a phenomenal magazine.

Now as for your other thoughts, I'll cut right to the chase. (1) You definitely didn't cause the QBN shut down. I thought you were one of the only rational people on the forums that day, actually. And now you're a moderator at QBasic News, so I guess other people agree with me. :) (2) For some reason making GUIs has always been incredibly popular among the Qmunity (I'm not sure why exactly), but there's definitely a huge amount of people that are very interested in them. I mean just look at Jacob Palm's and Todd Seuss's GUI reviews sites. As long as there's demand in the Qmunity, QB Express will be there to cover it. (3) I agree that we've got to give props to Adigun for his persistence in starting a QB compo, but I think that he would have had a lot more success with his previous competitions if he had done them right in the first place. Competitions with too many rules always fail in this community. I think that's why the new FBTK Roguelike competition is doing so well -- it's simple and it's fun.

Anyway, nice hearing from you again! (I'm sure I'll hear from you again next month too, heheh.)

-Pete

Letter From anarky

Everyone:

QUOTE FROM ISSUE #10:

QBasic Network (http://www.qbasicnetwork.com/)
Anarky actually started this website a few weeks ago, but it's been little more than a forum since then. (It also has a bit of Legend of Aquarius info -- about an RPG in the works). But otherwise it's a new QB forum that has has a tiny bit of activity and an annoying default skin (Blue Steel). Hopefully this site will expand become more active soon.

That annoying blue skin is permanant, for now. When the site goes fully skinned, a visitor will be able to change it. I have had no prior experience with PHP until now, so I'm still learning it. When I jointly won the hosting package in the Space Invaders cometition, I really had no idea what to start with.

Legend of Aquarius is halted momentarily due to work on the site. I just haven't the hours left in the day after real life is dealt with.

QB forum: It's not just a QB forum. Why don't you go there and see for yourself? There's a FreeBasic section , C/C++, General stuff, etc. What more do I need? Besides, before the advent of FreeBasic, everything was QB. I'm a QB programmer by default. Say the two following addresses:

QBasic Network
FBasic Network

In my opinion, Q sounded better than F. So there. But regardless of name, a site is nothing if it has nothing to offer. Same could have been said about www.qb45.com for those new to the Qmunity. But those who have been around for some time, and/or know better, the site was and will be again a bustling community, simply because of its roots.

Yes, QBasic Network will expand and become more active. But I need the support of everyone in the community. Yes, you too. I see you hiding in that corner. THOU CANNOT FEARETH THEE WRATH OF THY MEGASITE-ETH!!!

On a lighter note, it's good to see some activity and postive comments and criticism. Good sites take time. There will soon be an archive of sorts to sift through. Not all of QB. Mainly games I have found enjoyable (and playable) in the past. At first, they will all be QB. Myself and Jatos are in talks about a sister site solely for FreeBasic.

By the way, why oh why, after all this time do people refuse to accept that my nickname is all lowercase? No caps! Lose them!

Until next time, adios!

>anarky

Man, you really took offense to that one little news post, didn't you? Sorry if I offended you. However, I'll stand by everything I wrote last month; that's still my opinion.

A few responses --

(1) These days when I say "QB", I'm referring to QBasic, QuickBasic *and* FreeBasic. This magazine is called QB Express, but it's mostly about FreeBasic. I know your website also has other forums for languages besides QB, and I'm sure that all of the readers would have understood that too.

(2) You say that QB45.com has nothing to offer? It has 1,000 QB programs and tutorials to download! I wouldn't call that "nothing". (And that's not even mentioning an *active* forum.)

(3) The reason your name was capitalized in that one instance was because it was at the beginning of a sentence. Standard practice in the English language. If you look through the rest of the issue, you'll notice that your name is left in lowercase in all other instances.

(4) I still don't like the Blue Steel skin. It's ugly and makes everything hard to read.

Sorry if I'm critical of your site, but I really don't think another forum is necessary. There are already enough forums around the Qmunity that barely get any posts. I wish you luck with your site, but if you want to create a popular and successful website you need to get content first and then add a forum later when it's warranted. Read my article from QB Express #1, Does The World Need Another QB Forum?

-Pete

Have a letter for the editor? Send all your rants, raves, ideas, comments and questions to pberg1@gmail.com.

News Briefs

News from all around the QB community, about the latest games, site updates, program releases and more!

QB Site News

QB45.com Relaunches!

Two years after the Qmunity hub was destroyed by a rogue webmaster, QB45.com has finally relaunched! Jofers and Fling-master have spent the last year toiling away on the new site design and its custom PHP database system, which has been gradually unveiled, piece by piece, through the QB45 forum. The site was finally finished and launched in late May, and was met with accolades from people all over the community. New features include a membership-based system which gives you access to the message board, file adding and commenting abilities, the ability to submit news, and more. Additionally, the redesigned site still has all of QB45's gigantic files archive, by far the biggest on the web. Unfortunately though, much of the other old content we remember from QB45 and Future Software has been lost due to the turmoil of constant ownership and server switches. With time the site will certainly grow, and hopefully it will one day be able to restore its former glory.

QBasic News Returns

By now, you're probably fully aware of the story. After last month's QBasic News shut down, Wildcard had second thoughts and opened the site back up just a few days later. Then he retired as owner of QBasic News and turned over possession of the website to the new owner Sumo Jo. This was also reported in the update to QB Express #10, and this month you can check out my Interview with Sumo Jo for the full story.

QBXL Audio Editions 5 and 6 Released

SJ Zero, editor of rival QB mag QBXL, has released two new editions of his audio Qmunity news updates. QBXL Audio Edition #5 covers the chaos following QBasic News shutdown, likening the event to a giant war. SJ Zero acts as your imbedded correspondent, bringing you the latest from the battlefield. QBXL Audio Edition #6 is a more standard release, bringing us the latest project and site news from around the QB community, with a healthy dose of QBXL's trademark humor and wit. Worth a listen!

FBTK Roguelike Competition is ON FIRE

Most QB and FB programming competitions have very few, if any, entries, very little fanfare, and when they fizzle out and die, nobody really notices. That's definitely not the case with the latest FreeBasic.tk compo. The new FBTK Roguelike competition is HOT. It is so popular, in fact, that it has its own forum at FBTK, and already five "freelance contestants" and five two-person teams have signed up to enter the competition. The rules are simple: "Create a Rogue like using FreeBasic or QuickBasic." And the requirements are even simpler: "Have fun." Go check out the FBTK forums and read about this competiton -- and join if you have any interest at all. I expect great things to come from this competition.

Mennonite's "No Broken Links" Project

QB Express contributor and member of The QBasic Forum (QBasic.com), mennonite, has begun a project to end the problems of broken QB links on the Internet. Recently he launched this site and began reviewing the links pages of QB sites, searching out both the working and the broken links. He has done four sites so far, and hopes to finish 100 links pages by the beginning of 2006. According to mennonite: "the premise is, there are far too many dead qb links online. While it isn't possible to fix them all, it's my hope that this page will put a more than just noticeable dent in the problem."

Already mennonite's project is starting to work. This month, he has helped me take care of the broken QB links on Pete's QB Site. In the year since I created my 350+ QB links archive, nearly 50 of them have gone down (which should give you a picture of how fast QB sites go down). He searched through my links section and sent me a list of all the dead links so that I could easily bring the section up to date. Hopefully other QB site owners will welcome the help he hopes to provide and the dead QB links epidemic will begin to subside.

New x.t.r. GRAPHICS FreeBasic Site Launches

Rattrapmax6 brought his x.t.r. GRAPHICS site into the 21st century a few days ago with a nice redesign and some much needed updates. Previously, the site had that distinctive look that I'd classify as 1997 GeoCities style. :) Now the Downloads section is up to date and organized, and the "Links Town" has expanded beyond just two buildings. Not to mention the new look. Sweeeeet.

Data Components Reaches 100 QB GUI Reviews

Todd Seuss's highly productive but often overlooked GUI Review site has hit a new milestone: this past month, Data Components passed 100 reviews. But that's an understatement. Todd didn't just pass 100 reviews, he tromped that number. With 123 GUI reviews, Data Components is by far the largest QB GUIs site anywhere. And it's definitely worth a visit.

Hezoe Launches TGSite

Hezoe opened up a new homepage that plays host to his various BASIC projects. It's called TGSite and it's mostly about RapidQ, though there's some QB/FB stuff too. Also make sure you check out the short little snippet he wrote about RapidQ this month, down in the Projects section.

QBXL.net Gets Redesign...oh, and that Structure Compo thing

QBXL.net, home of QB Accelerator magazine and all of SJ Zero's projects, had a complete redesign this past month. Now it is managed entirely by a CMS, and has that distinctive "blog" look to it. Which is good, I guess, since it now doubles as SJ Zero's QBXL and FB programming newsblog. SJ also went through all the old QBXL articles and pasted them as blog articles (though he unfortunately left out all of the pictures that went with them -- tsk, tsk).

In other news, SJ Zero hosted another one of his marathon 48-hour FreeBasic programming competitions, this time called the "Structure Compo". As far as I can tell, only Xerol and SJ Zero entered anything (and I think both their entries were unfinished)...and no winner was ever declared. For the "full" story, check out the QBXL forums.

TBN 1000 Line Platformer Compo

The Basic Network began its first competition this past month, to make a platformer with 1000 lines of code or less. However, it looks like nobody entered by the June 20th deadline. That's a shame, because I was looking forward to the game Los Monos Del Obús was planning on entering: "Betty's Bodacious Day Out".

Project News

Jocke The Beast's MirkWood ported to FB: Jocke The Beast wrote: "Sotsvart (aka Jonge) has compiled Mirkwood under fb with good results. Only big changes are that it now uses fmod and has pixel * tile scrolling. Otherwise it's still the same crappy game. " If you've never played Mirkwood (or any of Jocke's Middle Earth games), check it out.
Quest For A King Demo: SJ Zero released a demo of the new FreeBasic version of his RPG Quest For A King. It's a cool game and definitely worth a look. I'd write more, but I don't want to be redundant...::cough, cough::
ASCIIQUEST Editor v1.0 Released: Jace Masula has released version 1.0 of his text mode game maker, ASCIIQUEST. You can find the new release at QBasic Lab. In the newest release, Jace "Added more featured including 15+ new scripting commands and background music and sound." If you're a regular QB Express reader, you should already know all about ASCIIQUEST Editor though, since we featured it in last month's Gallery article. Jace is currently using his editor to create a game called "Dragon Quest", and I encourage the rest of you to try to make your own games using this extensive game-making suite.
ASCII Scrolling Map Editor 2.0: Rattrapmax6 has been hard at work on his Scrolling Map Editor. You can find out all about it at this ASCII-WORLD post. Right now you can see some screenshots and read a list of features in that post, as well as check out the OpenGL Viewer for these maps.
VERY Simple RTS Made in FreeBasic: Irrit8or made this post at the FreeBasic.net forums to show off an EXTREMELY early sub-beta version of a real time strategy game he is making. According to irrit8or, "the game doesnt look so good, the reason I made it to learn how to program a rts game. EVERY feature possible was striped, so only a bare model of a rts was left. SIMPLICITY was more important, and the reason it actually got finished..." Being a big RTS fan, I checked it out and thought it was kinda neat. Maybe you will too.
Dmitry Smaghin Ports Some QB Games to FB...: Over on the FreeBasic.net forums, Dmitry Smaghin released some quick and dirty ports of QB games to FB. The two games were: QB Mario, a Super Mario World clone by Dark Eye QBasic Entertainment, and Backman, a Pac-Man clone from May of '98 by SkurK/b. I like QB ports, especially when they're of relatively obscure games.

As for the games themselves -- QB Mario may look just like the SNES game, but it certainly doesn't *play* like the SNES game. The gravity is on overdrive, the control is spotty, and you can't kick the turtle shells (that's a fatal error right there, that's for sure). Backman is a Pac-Man clone played on a grid that's far too big for its own good, sucking all the challenge out of the game. Plus the ghosts kind of jitter back and forth rather than chasing you around. Meh. Try them anyway, maybe you'll like 'em.
Zero_Divide Rolls Out CycloNe 2.5: The last version of Zero_Divide's QB GUI library CycloNe has been released. CycloNe was written using the Future Library, so it works with many different screen modes. It now features more object-oriented code, runtime creation controls, and an entirely rewritten core. To download it, visit the official site.
Light Bright!: LoKing has created a FreeBasic version of everyone's favorite elementary school pasttime: Light Bright! You know, the little toy where you poke colored plastic pegs through a piece of backlit black paper to make colorful dot drawings? No? Well then, you better check out LoKing's site and give his Light Bright program a spin.
Antoni Gual Hammers Out FB JPEG Loader: FB guru Antoni Gual has been hard at work making JPEG-loading routines for the FreeBasic Gfxlib, which will be a godsend for anyone trying to make a game with a lot of big (ie: full screen) images. Games with cut scenes or point-and-click adventure games. Check out this post for the skinny.
EzeeGUI: A FREE FreeBasic GUI Sample Designer: Jerry Fielden has been doing some pretty awesome work lately on his FreeBasic GUI library EzeeGUI. This could come in very handy for some FB programmers looking to save some time on their menus.

In case you're wondering -- "Many Controls are supported, such as: Editbox, Buttons, ListBox, ComboBox, CheckBox, Radio Buttons, ListViews, RichEdit, ReadOnly, Static control, Progress Bar, Horizontal TrakBar, Vertical TrackBar, Messagebox maker, Rectangles, Round Rectangles, Circles, Ovals, Hatches, Horizontal Etched Lines, Vertical Etched Lines, Bitmaps in Buttons, Bitmaps in Static control, Style changes, Etc.."

There is an extensive tutorial and a lot of other information available on the EzeeGUI site.
RelSoft Plays Around With 3D: RelSoft has made some very cool 3D FreeBasic demos this past month. One is his Quaternion Based Camera program, and the other is JeJunum, where you fly through a windy, endless 3D tunnel. Check 'em out!

Other News

Z!re Resurrects The Qmunity: The sometimes humorous inside-joke laden comic about the QB community done by that crazed berzerk Swede Z!re has returned for a second season. This past month, Z!re released three new comic strips making fun of various threads from the QBasic News forums. If you don't get the comics, then you should hang out at QBN more often! This thread has the goods.

Gallery

Written by Pete

Every issue QB Express features a preview and exciting new screenshots from an upcoming QB game. If you would like your game featured, send in some screenshots!

The Griffon Legend

Syn9 has demonstrated himself to be a phenomenal QB programmer in the past few years, quietly releasing countless 3D demos, beautiful screenshots of his work-in-progress QB RPGs, as well as his acclaimed 3D racing game Zero G. At this point, there's no doubt in anyone's mind that if Syn9's coding it, it's gonna be good.

For his first FreeBasic project, The Griffon Legend, Syn9 is really pulling out all the stops. This old-school action RPG truly wows with its detailed sprite graphics, silky smooth animation, and simple but highly-entertaining gameplay. Even in its early development stages, The Griffon Legend is already exuding the video game "X factor" that sets great games apart from the legions of the mediocre.

The Griffon Legend takes place in a fantasy kingdom inhabited by Griffons, "500 years after the Griffons wiped out their Dragon oppressors." Unfortunately, the Dragons have returned to reclaim their lands. The player has landed in a city that has just recently been sacked by the Dragon Lords, unaware that the dragons have attacked, let alone that they still exist. The Griffon Legend gets its name from a story about a group of griffon knights that were the heroes of the Griffon-Dragon war 500 years before the game begins. While the story is remarkably simple, I'm sure it will suffice for this mini RPG. Keep in mind that this is a Zelda-style action game with a focus less on storytelling and more on ... well ... action.

And action is exactly what this game does well. Using a barebones control setup of arrow keys, one attack key and one other key to access an items / magic menu, The Griffon Legend adheres quite strongly to the K.I.S.S. philosophy ("Keep It Simple Stupid"). The battle commands are simple to learn and intuitive. Sword attacks are easy to perform and using the magic spells couldn't be simpler. Unlike many hobbyist games, The Griffon Legend's control scheme makes you feel like you're in complete control over your character -- not just "along for the ride".

The Griffon Legend uses Zelda-style magic system, where you collect spells (indicated by an icon in your inventory) either by defeating bosses or finding them (using a special "search" spell that you get early in the game). One spell sends an avalanche of boulders hurtling down from the top of the screen which can be used as an attack or to destroy barricades that block your path, and another spell allows you to hurtle a cross-shaped boomerang at your enemies. The spells in this game are a varied and useful addition to your standard sword attack. In order to heal yourself, you pick up "flasks" from treasure chests or from slain enemies, which you can use when your health drops. Even in just the short demo of The Griffon Legend, I found over a hundred flasks -- which is a good thing, since I also needed to heal myself on a regular basis (especially during boss fights).

This game comes with all of the standard features you'd expect in an RPG -- your character collects experience points and levels up as he defeats enemies, you can find upgraded weapons and shields, and every enemy has its own HP guage (indicated by an orange bar that floats just below their feet. Whenever you deal damage to an enemy (or vise versa), numerals indicating how much damage was done appear briefly on the screen. Despite the standard statistics-based RPG features, though, The Griffon Legend doesn't get bogged down with numbers. Enemy health, experience and your own health are handled elegantly with bar graphs. And instead of complicating matters with unnecessary numeric stats like "weapon strength" or "defense", these stats are indicated by an icon representing which type of sword or armor your character is wearing at the time.

So far in the demo that I played, Syn9 has created two dungeons, as well as outside town and forest areas. Maps are made up of single-screen rooms with exits on the edges of the screen, much like many NES games (Zelda 1 comes to mind). The overworld graphics are detailed and organic. The dirt and grass tiles have believable textures, and the stone walls look old, cracked and worn. Character sprites look great too and move realistically -- they look as if they actually have weight and must lift more than their tippy-toes to walk (a problem I have with the walk cycles on most QB RPGs).

The bosses in this game are some of the best I've seen in any QB or FB game. Not only are they large and intimidating, they also have varied attacks that keep the fighting interesting. One early boss uses torches on the walls as weapons, hurling balls of fire at you from key locations on the wall. Meanwhile, he also hurls a razor-sharp circling boomerang at you. Players must avoid the fireballs and the boomerang simultaneously (which is a bit of a challenge, but it is not so difficult that it becomes cheap). And then when the boss's wave of attacks subside, you have a few seconds to run in and attack him with your sword. This is the way that good boss fights go in professional games, but very few QB/FB coders ever capture that tension where you're running for your life, and then charging in for an attack -- and always feel perfectly in control. The fights are dynamic and interesting, and also neither too hard or too easy -- a delicate balance that Syn9 really nailed.

The current beta version of The Griffon Legend (build 14) is not for public release. Syn9 plans on releasing a full, completed version of the game around July 15th. He's forgoing demos, in favor of releasing only a finished game (like he did with his other hit, Zero G). The final version will include more enemies and new gameplay options, as well as original sound effects and music. I'm sure you're looking forward to it as much as I am!

Visit the Syn9's page for the latest updates.

How I Got Started With QB

Written by Matthew R. Knight

NOTE: This article was originally written for the January 2004 issue of QB Cult Magazine, in response to Wildcard's request for articles of this nature. Seeing as QBCM is dead however, I decided I'd send it to QB Express instead.

QB was a part of my life when it was my life, and the effort and time that I poured into QBCM in the early days, issue 2 in particular, reflects that.

The recent (and unexpected) resurgance in the QB scene reminds me of events gone past and things related to 2000. The scene I remember exists now only in my memory... a lot has changed, and yes so has the world, and much is no more now.

I started coding in QB in 1995. Everything I knew of the language at the time I had gathered from a very simple book I discovered in the school library. Unfortunately, it was written for Spectrum users, and so most of the information was incompatible. My programming persuits were therefore limited mostly to text adventures for a long time. In hindsight, it's a miracle I stuck with it.

My skills slowly developed after I started reading the help file. To childish eyes, it seemed rediculously terse. They might as well have written it in a foreign language. In frustration, I sold my computer for R600 and bought a motorbike from my friend Bradley, who had a lot of bikes just lying about. My friend Andrew and I used to ride about in the sugarcane plantation nearby my house (he paid for the petrol, and in exchange I let him ride my bike). This move was understandably met by staunch dissaproval from my father, and I was forced to sell the bike a few months later. I used the money to buy another computer: a 286 with 640K and a monochrome (well, amber) monitor, which costed R850. (So at least I made a tidy profit on the bike. :P Not that it means a damn thing now... I recently got myself a Linux box: P233 MMX, 32MB, 2.1 gig HDD, monitor... everything, it even has a LAN card. It only costed R350 (that's about equal to 50 USD). Times sure have changed.) I didn't really mind though, Andrew moved to Cape Town and I had no one else to ride with (barring a bunch of guys in their late teens and early 20's who I sometimes hung with, to the complete dismay of my parents. Some day I'll have to tell you about the one time when Douglas, one of the smokers among them, accidently set fire to the sugarcane ("hey guys, what's that crackling sound?") and we had to make a quick get-away on our bikes, heheh. Good times.)

It turned out that the guy who bought my bike didn't know that you have to mix two-stroke oil with the petrol (even though I told him many times), so the engine was soon ruined. What a waste.

In late January '97 I was introduced to the QB community through my friend Petar (yes, that is the correct spelling) from school, who had an internet connection (still something quite rare in South Africa back then). Petar was a dark, strapping Yugoslavian refugee, already 6 feet tall and built like a tank. Though barely a teenager, he had a gruff voice that would surely strike fear even in the hearts of grown men, he already shaved, and his legs and arms were covered in an immense mass of bushy black hair. The other kids were understandably terrified of him, so he was a good friend to have. :) He hadn't been in the country for long, and his English (or the lack thereof) amused me and my schoolmates to no end. In typical Eastern-European style, he would often swap his v's and w's, leading to hilarious wonders such as "my computer has a wirus." Every time he tried to say the word 'volley ball', laugher shook the high heavens.

Amongst the treasures he downloaded, I was shocked to discover such masterpieces as Dark Crown, Wetspot 1, and the awesome Legend of Lith 2. ("Are you sure this is QB?!") All brand new games at the time. I hurriedly pieced together 'games' (I use that term very loosely) such as UFO and Pacland, which Petar then uploaded for me. Both were text-based action games, though Pacland turned out to be more of a strategy somehow. It was based on the code for a similar game called 'Zombie', undoubtedly a name rife with single entendre, the listings for which I had found in some old C64 games book. I wasn't much of a programmer, and as mentioned, I did them in a hurry, so not surprisingly, the ratings they recieved were dismal at best. (Apparantly the owner of one QB site wrote a small comment next to my games in the margin... I'm told it was something to the effect of "WHY??????" heheh.) I must admit though, those old days weren't quite as gold as some of the other 'oldies' among us might have you believe. Tuturials were still few and far between, and often left much to be desired. That, coupled with the weak processing power we had available to us at the time, not to mention the fact that the pricing of new computers back then was something quite disgraceful, did not bode well for the QB community. So admittedly, a lot of the games from back then were, politely spoken, pure shit.

Of course, my own skills reeked of baby diapers themselves, so I was impressed all the same. I think we've all come a very long way in the last 7 years. Unfortunately, I couldn't run most QB stuff on my own box, being stuck with a monochrome screen and what all. All I could really run for at least half of '97 was Rockwars -- a game I eventually did a remake of in 2000 -- and Kenneth Green's Dungeon of Motion and Sound. But it was better than nothing, and I was surprised to find so many other people who also liked QB. Confidence restored, I formed a 'company' (heheh) with Petar and two other guys from school; Kevin, a quiet German boy with strawberry blond hair, and Liam, a rebellious towheaded Irishman, with a reckless grin to match his nature, and pale blue eyes that looked exactly like frozen ice.

Determined to make our millions and take over the world, our new 'company' (you know what I mean) would meet up at Kevin's house every weekend and on holidays, to make revolutionary PC games, in Qbasic, that would ultimately take the world by storm. Apparantly Kevin had a friend of a friend of a friend who's uncle's mom's dog once saw this guy who could get a demo of our game on the cover of PC Gamer, and as far as we were concerned, our futures as multi-million dollar game programmers were as good as carved in stone. Of course, we spent most of that time at Kevin's playing Mech Warrior instead (actually, Kevin would play, the rest of us just had to sit there and watch), or playing basketball outside.

Disenchanted with the progress we hadn't made over 6 months or so, we decided that we needed our own office, and that building this in Kevin's back yard was somehow the answer. Convinced that this latest scheme would assure our success, we worked day and night at this over the Christmas holidays of '97, and it actually turned out surprisingly well (although Petar practically built the whole thing himself). The roof leaked when it rained and it lacked electricity -- not exactly the ideal headquarters for our multi-million dollar games studio -- but it was our headquarters, and we were proud of it right?

I would often go to Petar's house first to use the internet, and then we'd lug our computers all the way to Kevin's place later on. The one day it looked like it might rain, and we could hear thunder in the distance. We weren't too keen on having our computers rained on, obviously, so we started to run. You can imagine what this spectacle must have looked like to the passing motorists, and we were concerned that we might be arrested as burglars.

Come to think of it, it's a bloody miracle our hard-drive's didn't get bad sectors.

We held meetings in our 'headquarters' once in a while, but this was not all plain sailing at first. An unruly element tried for a time to disrupt our meetings by throwing stones and fire crackers on the roof of our shack, and even jumping from a high bank on to the roof and dancing on it. We were very eager to dash out and try conclusions with the young hooligans, but Petar, the oldest and most sensible among us, guessed that it was precisely what they hoped for and encouraged us to avoid a confrontation. Instead we ignored them and eventually the interference abated.

We didn't use our shack much due to the lack of electricity, so eventually Kevin's dad claimed it, and used it as a place to store some of the excess junk in the garage. 1998 passed quickly and aside from some mini-games I made, no one did anything much really, and barring an incident where Liam demonstrated his leet throwing, catching (and ultimately dropping and hence breaking) skills with Kevin's wireless mouse, thus leading to him being kicked out the group, nothing really changed.

Petar and I eventually stopped being friends after he accused me of stealing his Duke Nukem CD (which he later found in his CD-ROM drive...), Kevin emigrated to America, and that was the end of that. Although Liam and I remained friends, neither of us were interested in starting another game company. At the beginning of 1999, I finally got the internet at home, and I suppose this marked my real entrance into the QB community, because Petar had always hogged the keyboard back in the day. I used this new opportunity to download as much as I could, especially tutorials or code I could learn from, and I made massive strides in a very short time. In December 1999 I started using the QB chatroom at qbasic.com and several popular discussion boards, finally making me a QB'er in the fullest sense. Not long later, QB Cult Magazine, otherwise known as QBCM, was founded -- a project through which I hoped to share my knowledge and love of QB, and in part, to fill the massive hole in the scene that Qbasic: The Magazine had left.

At around the same time, Terry Cavanagh (Traveller), William Moores, Svante Ekholm Lindahl (AlienQB) and myself formed Dark Legends Software. We were just a newbie group really, and we only managed a few mini-games. Although it's highly unlikely that anyone but us remembers our group or anything we did -- we weren't Enhanced Creations, we weren't Darkness Ethereal -- it was and still is important to me, as it represents one of the happiest times in my life.

I'm really glad that Wildcard wants to do this series on the history of the QB on the web, because I've always been really interested in QB history. But I'm going to let you in on a little secret seldom learnt and often forgotten... our community is built on the things we never see or hear about. It isn't the legends like Enhanced, or the classics like Dark Crown or Wetspot 2, that make our community what it is and was, what has kept it alive all this time. It's none of that. It's the friendships we make, even the enemies, the sleepless nights we spend finding that one last bug (for the tenth time heh), forgotten groups like Dark Legends, forgotten games like Rockwars 2000, like Black Hole, our forgotten flames and rants on our many forums, our impossible dreams, Dunric's quest to find a wife heh... so on so forth. These are things that you will never see mentioned in any magazines or articles, but lemme tell ya, this is the good stuff. It's the sort of stuff you'll still remember 20 years from now.

These are things that can exist now only in our thoughts... unless we put pen to paper (or fingers to keys, whatever floats your boat heh) and write them down. Behind the handles and (make-believe) company names there exists stories we know nothing about. In this article, some of mine have been revealed to you today.

I dissapeared from the QB scene a long time ago, and although I had always meant to return some day, I rightly know that I can't and never will. A month away became six months, then a year, and now four... that chapter of my life ends along with this article. Anyway, before I leave you poor bastards in peace once and for all (smile Mags), I would like to share with you the following programs from my early days. This is by no means a complete collection (many of my programs have unfortunately been lost), but it's something anyway. If this article didn't succeed in making you laugh, I'm sure these will. :)

RACER.BAS: The first driving game I ever made, though it hardly qualifies as one. I completed this on December 31st 1996, which makes it the oldest game in this collection. This is one of the first graphical games I ever made. Unfortunately, I was stuck using SCREEN 3 since all I had at the time was that black and white monitor. At around the same time I was working on an untitled graphical text adventure, inspired by Space Quest II - one of my favorite games of all time. If/when I find it, I'll send you a copy.

ROCKET.BAS: My first graphics demo. :) I can't remember when I made this, but based on the code, I'd say it's either January or February 1997.

STUNT.BAS: An incomplete Hollywood stunt driver typa thing, dating back to mid-1997. I thought the graphics were brilliant at the time... I have no idea why, heh. The setting's Hollywood, but I went and put up signs for exclusively South African shops (like CNA) heh. Some of the names I just made up. (You can change the value of the S variable, anything up to 32, to affect which screen you're on.)

MONKEY.BAS: Monkey Shoot! Actually, this game sucks, maybe I should have called it Monkey Shit. I completed this some time in August, 1997. Kevin came up with the idea for this game in English class the one day, while some monkeys were playing on the roof. I think the fact that the first thing he thought of doing was shooting them speaks volumes about the mentality of the average schoolboy, heh.

DARK.EXE: Just a simple shooting in space typa thingy I completed on September 12th, 1998. It's the first game I made that my friends didn't think was crap. Their sentiment towards my ingenuity in making up names for my games was a little different though, heh.

F1RACE.BAS: Yet another racer that didn't get very far. I barely remember making this.

TC1.BAS: The first of the two Tank Commander games, completed on April 13th, 1999. Work actually started on this soon after the release of Wetspot 2. I originally had a much more ambitious game than this in mind, determined to compete with the likes of Angelo's masterpiece... In the end, I found that I had bitten off far more than I could chew, and after repeated failure, interest in the project was soon lost. The project gathered dust for almost a year, and then one weekend I finally finished it off... Well, sort of. You may have noticed the complete lack of hit detection on the sides of the road? :) At that point I was so bloody sick of the game, I couldn't have cared less about doing a decent job, heh. I might have added it in if the game was a bit better, but it sucked, and I knew it - it was not the Tank Commander that was going to take the QB world by storm, as I had originally planned. An almost apologetic bit of blurb appeared in the introductory text, a sort of half-assed attempt at passing the bug off as an exciting feature, heh. "...and the ability to demolish anything in their path. Even the tallest building is no match for these monsters!!!" There is no such thing as a bug in a videogame! To make matters worse, the credits screen smacks of irony... "Concept: About a million other un-origional programmers ;)" Well... The spelling of that word is certainly very, ahem, origional, heh. :)

DESTROYR.BAS: A very simple mini-game, completed within 3 hours on May 3rd, 1999. Although it is outstanding in no way, I was very proud of it because the sprites didn't obliterate the background - a problem that had been driving me up the wall ever since I started programming.

3DRPG.BAS: An RPG engine (or at least an attempt at one) in a three-dimensional setting, which... Well, it didn't work very well did it? :) June 1999.

3DTRI.bas: My first "real" 3d program. Again, June 1999. I was very, VERY proud of this back in the day. :) The two main inspirations for this program (and what motivated me to try and overcome the seeminly insurmountable obstacle of learning 3d) was Xeno and Groov Buggies - the former in particular. I was determined to eventually make something similar, but ended up trying my hand at a Groov Buggies type game instead. This is where all the problems started. :) The engine had no perspective, and no backface culling. I didn't even know where to start with the backface culling, but on September 21st I finally managed to implement perspective correction, and came up...

DOOM.BAS: ...with this. Gosh but I was happy when I got this to work. :) At last work could begin on my driving game! Or not, heh. Being a clueless newbie and all, I didn't know that a pair of world coordinates may not be in line with or behind the camera - it took me until October 20th to figure that out. Self-confidence restored, I set out to solve the backface culling problem and... came up with bugger all, heh. At least until much later anyway, and by then I had other plans. So my driving game never got any further than Doom.bas. :) (Some of you might remember that I used this same program in my 3d tutorial in issue 3.)

TANK COMMANDER V2.ZIP: As the introductory text explains, it's just the same thing as before, but with much better code. August 15, 1999. I sent this to a bunch of QB sites later in the year. (I would have sent it earlier, but I couldn't get my e-mail to work. Eventually someone on qbchat told me about hotmail, and I've been using that ever since.)

DLS.ZIP: All my games from Dark Legends Software. I don't need to talk about them here, there's more than enough waffle in the documentation. (Regarding Qbasic: The Rpg, I've never understood why people didn't immediately get that GODQB was actually a thinly-painted parody of the young Liquidex (formerly known as LordQBASIC). Duh!!)

-- Matthew Knight

Download zip archive with this article and all of Matthew's programs.

Review of Rattrapmax6's ASCII Scrolling Map Maker 1.0

A review by Stéphane Richard (Mystikshadows)

INTRODUCTION:

In this review, I will be covering Rattrapmax6's ASCII Scrolling Map Maker 1.0, a great tool for whoever needs to create a scrollable map for their games. To start this review off, here is a screenshot of the designer part of this software.

This review will be broken down into review items to which I will bring my personal score and opinion. I will try to remain impartial in my review in order to given a non subjective and fair review. Finally I will total up the score and give it a final percentage.

Functionality and features: 8/10 points

By Functionality and features I mean what does the software offer me in terms of features and what I can do with the software in relation with what the software was designed for. In this case I believe the software successfully offers a complete range of functionality and features to allow me to quickly and easily create the maps I need. It even has a renderer to get a global view of the whole map as a seperate program.

Another side of application development that shouldn't be overlooked is user feedback. What the program returns to the user to let him know what is happening or what just happened. In that regard, the application gives sufficient feedback to the user to let him know what tile he's using, where he is on the map, what type of tile he is currently creating with and so forth. This is an important factor in the score I've given the features part of the review.

Layout and Disposition: 9/10 points

Although some might argue a bit on this feature I describe Layout and Disposition the overall organization of what I'm seeing on the screen and how it helps the usability of the application. As you can see from the screenshot, everything is right there in front of you. No menus, just options that can be clicked on right away. As far as tools and utilities go, having everything there and ready is a big plus as it doesn't hide any features behind a hierarchy of menu or commands. It allows to do the job much quicker when intelligently organized on the screen. That's why I gave it a score of 9 because everything can be done directly from the main screen.

Note that this particular part of the review is often a question of personal taste. I happen to like the layout used here. Some might not. So the review is based on an unbiased statistically based evaluation. As such, I put myself in the place of common mortals and attempt to see through their eyes how they would like a map generator to look like and be used.

Suitability to the task: 8/10

Here I measure how well focused the programmer was in his way of presenting the features to the user in relations to the category of the program. Here we have a scrolling map generator designed to create maps that will ultimately scroll as any other text scrolling games. As such, I would say that the program itself is close to perfect for the task at hand. The only thing I might have wanted differently is to be able to scroll through the map without needing to select the tile to edit (scroll in it as I would if I was playing the game). And I would have integrated the renderer right in the application. However, the renderer is there that's why I gave it a 8 out of 10 points.

Another aspect of the review, in regards to suitability to the task is the whole feel of the application in general. When you open a word processor, you expect things to be in certain places, you expect certain features to be present because it's a word processor. As far as a map generator goes, you can expect things to be there as well. In that aspect, you can clearly see you are in a map editor so that too helped with the scoring.

Overall performance rating: 10/10

Those of you that have tried this utility will agree that this is a very fast application, I have noticed no hold ups or any stalling while using the application and creating maps. Likewise because of the direct availability of all the functions that too contributes to the overall performance of the application. Everything works quite fast and simply put it's a map designer on steroids.

As I mentionned earlier in this review, the user feedback plays it's role here too in the performance score. Because it's easy to see what's going on, no time is waisted trying to figure out what to do next. It's very straightforward which really helps get things done fast.

The Final Word

All in all, the ASCII Scrolling Map Maker 1.0 is a great application to use to create your maps. It's a completely integrated application that offers all the functionality you need to create your maps. Often the 200x200 is big enough for most mapping tasks but perhaps an ability to change the size of the map might be a good idea. I know version 2.0 is in the making and I for one can't wait to see what extra features will be added to that version.

³⁵/₄₀
(87.5%)

I think that Rattrapmax6 did an excellent job in this first version of his scrolling map editor, it is a well designed program that really makes map creation as easy as it can get. He gets my 2 thumbs up on this project.

Stéphane Richard
srichard@adaworld.com

Check this thread for ASCII Scrolling Map Editor v1 info, this thread for info on version 2.0, or visit the x.t.r. GRAPHICS FreeBasic Site.

Where Are They Now?
Gianfranco Berardi

Written by anarky

Welcome to QB Express' column, "Where are they now?" I go and have a chat with QB programmers of days gone by. Some you may have heard of, some you may have not. This month, Gianfranco Berardo basically tells us his life story in a nutshell.

My first computer was an Apple II C+ when I was probably about 10 or 12 years old. My parents bought it when Apple computers arrived at my grade school. For those who don't know it, this machine was as powerful as the original NES. You used it similarly, putting in floppy disks and turning on the computer to run programs. There was no hard drive. The first game I played that got me to realize I could create things was Bill Budge's "Pinball Construction Set". You can see some info on it here: http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?id=826

It was one of the first games to use the joystick that I got with the computer. I didn't have a mouse. I made myself a few crazy pinball boards, and it was fun to make and play them.

Unfortunately I couldn't make anything else. I remember wanting to make my own game but had no concept of what programming was. I turned on the machine with no disk and got a command prompt. I actually started typing in paragraphs along the lines of: "I want this game to be like Troll's Tale, only with weapons like swords and stuff. There should be blah blah blah..." until I hit the 255 character limit and got "SYNTAX ERROR?" So much for making games.

I remember my mother was learning Applesoft BASIC and showed me my name printed on the screen 10 times. The code was probably:

10 FOR i = 1 to 10
20 PRINT "GIANFRANCO BERARDI"
30 NEXT i
40 END

Maybe a few months later, my cousin came over and we somehow got fascinated with the computer. I wanted to show him how to do the program my mother did, but I didn't know how she did it. Luckily the book I affectionately called "Apple's Beginners Guide to Beginners All-purpose Instruction Code" was nearby. While my cousin was there, I actually read the thing to find out what to do. I made my name appear 10 times, and then my cousin made the computer swear 10 times.

He left shortly afterward, but I stayed at the computer and started making it do other things. Count to 10 (that was a standard number to use, huh?), ask questions, etc. I don't know how long I stayed there, but from then on I was a programmer.

Since I didn't have Internet access at the time (NOTE to children: please try very hard to think about what life was like), I went to the local library and took out books on programming in BASIC. I copied the code out of the books. It would be months before I found a way to save the code to disk.

In the meantime, I wrote simple text-based RPGs. The entire game was hardcoded, so I had code that ran somewhat like this:

- display message about room 1
- display choices
- ask for choice
- depending on choice, GOTO appropriate section of code, which redundantly does the above again.

No functions. No subroutines. Just a long listing of code that shouldn't have been so long. Learning how to program on your own is fun, but you defintiely pick up bad habits quickly. B-)

Still, using those books and the Apple's Beginner's book, I found out how to do graphics in lowres and hires. I wrote programs to draw simple images, like words or circles. It was around that time that I realized, like most programmers I'm sure, that if I could write a program to draw pictures, I could probably write my own games! REAL games, the kind with graphics and action!

My first attempt: a Pac-man clone. I learned how to program vector graphics in hires mode. You could rotate an "object" and scale it, which was really cool. So I drew Pac-man. I drew ghosts. I even made Pac-man move from one side of the screen to another. But I couldn't figure out how to make it play like Pac-man!

I moved on to easier projects, such as turn-based games. My first complete game was called "Capture the Flag", and thinking back on it, it wasn't even a clone of any games I played. It truly was an original game for me. Essentially, you have a grid map. In the top-left and bottom-right corners, you had two stick figures representing the players. Each player took turns moving about the map trying to find the opponent's flag. Each square on the grid was hiding something. By the end of the project, I had bombs and multiple lives for the players. My sister and my friends would actually play it with me without me forcing them to do so! Definitely a success.

I didn't get my first PC until sophomore year of high school. It was 150MHz and ran Windows 95. There was no programming language on it, but I was spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to use it anyway. Then someone at school introduced me to QBasic, and when I saw it, I realized that it was so much more powerful than what I had used before. Hires? SCREEN 12 was REAL hires! Once again, I attempted to make Pac-man.

I ended up scrapping it, working on other things first, then going back. I made Pac-man a bit smaller on the screen since it flickered a LOT otherwise. Now it only flickers a little. B-) I used INKEY$ for the movement, which made it difficult to control, but I didn't know better. The result is what I made in 1998. I even tried to write an RPG, but managed to get a rather sophisticated walking demo. You could walk across multiple maps, enter towns, caves, and castles, and exit in a completely different area. I even had a fairly simple scripting language to handle it all, along with conversation trees and the like. And all before I knew what a scripting language was. Again, this is before I had even heard about using the Internet. I really thought I was pushing the envelope with QBasic then.

A couple of years later, I was online. One of the first things I did was look up "QBasic" in a search engine. OH MY GOSH! There were so many sites out there! AWESOME! And then I saw some of the projects out there, and they put my accomplishments to shame. Still, I was pleased to learn that I had reinvented things that were common knowledge in programming, which has to count for something, right?

I started posting on message boards. I was probably one of those annoying new-to-the-Interweb people. I may have even violeted some Netiquette rules, but I can't remember how naive I was then. Eventually I thought, "Hey, why not get other people to look at games I made?" So I took Pac-man, combined it with Tic-Tac-Toe and Guess the Number, zipped them up, and uploaded them somewhere. I asked people on maybe 20 message boards to check it out. I also pleaded with them to be nice because it was made two years ago in 1998. I was ecstatic when it received a 70% on Pete's QBasic Site, and laughed at how WisdomDude kept mentioning the fact that was two years old throughout the review.

I lived at qb45.com mostly, saying silly things like "I program in QBasic 1.1 but run the programs in QBasic 4.5 because it is faster" or "Microsoft just gets a bad rap because it's so big." I was fairly unknowledgable. When WisdomDude had told me about a Pac-man clone reviewed at VPlanet, I had to check it out. I remember the game got a fairly decent review, but I was a bit suspicious about the "innovation" of a ghost that goes through walls. Recalling my own Pac-man clone's development, I thought, "Making the ghosts OBEY the walls was more difficult!" I also saw that it used graphics from other programs without crediting them, such as the famous PixelPlus256.

That's when I decided to start my own game review website. I already had a really basic one page site on Angelfire called Pigeon's QBasic Site: GBGames (my nickname at college was Pigeon, but I found that simply calling myself "Gianfranco, GBGames" on the forums was a lot easier. Eventually I shortened it to GBGames). Anyway, I gave that game a 57.25%. In retrospect, I think I was a bit harsh on such games. I mean, most hobbyist game projects don't get finished! It had to be demoralizing to read "Interesting intro. Too bad the same couldn't be said for the game." Ouch. I still can't believe how much of a jerk I was in some reviews.

I tried to review a lot of games. I don't think I tried to get anything different from what V Planet offered at the time, but I did post on a LOT of forums, asking for submissions. Eventually my site got so popular that I didn't have to ask anymore since I had such a backlog of games to review. By the time I stopped updating the site, I had 55 game reviews. I still have a directory on my hard drive of games that people submitted.

The worst times were when I didn't write a review for months at a time. I think most or all hobbyist webmasters have those dry spells, where Real Life pulls them away. Homework, girlfriends, etc. I do remember doubling my efforts, especially when V Planet would hit a dry spell. I remember the panic when new game review sites would appear in the community. Competition is a good motivator at times.

I remember throughout the years when major players in the QBasic community would say good-bye. It was always sad, like when Pete disappeared, or when Jordan (Jorden? Google says it is both) Chamid left QB45. Still, I never thought I would be one of them.

At one point, I just couldn't dedicate the time to following the QBasic world, let alone review games and update a website. People had periodically offered to help maintain the site, but I always considered it my own and didn't like the idea of others writing reviews. One day, I realized that I wasn't really paying much attention to Qbasic anymore, so I decided to stop. My last real update was apparently January 31st, 2003. I think for some time the site was down, but on August 25th, 2004 I updated the site and moved it to http://qbasic.gbgames.com.

What am I doing now? I actually still do game reviews, believe it or not. I review indie games at GameTunnel and it was my QBasic review site was what helped me get the opportunity to do so. I also have aspirations to run my own shareware game business. I am working with C++ and SDL (http://www.libsdl.org) mostly. I'm a huge Gnu/Linux enthusiast, and for the record, QBasic runs just fine in DOSbox. My Pac-man game still flickers in it. I maintain a blog http://www.gbgames.com/blog where I focus on game development and tech talk.

I still pop in from time to time to check on the community. I am especially pleased with what has been done with Pete's QBasic Site. I've been hearing a bit about FreeBasic, but not enough to comment on it. Still, knowing that QBasic lives on in some form in an age when DOS is mostly dead (I think people have been saying that when I was still active too) is great. And I know that QBasic.com still has an active online forum, which still amazes me! Who runs that site anyway?

For new developers, always keep learning. Always keep pushing what you can do. There are named techniques and practices that you probably don't know about, so make an effort to learn. And have fun. When hacking out code isn't fun anymore, realize that you've taken a wrong turn somewhere.

I remember talking to various people throughout the years, such as Phil Lutas, Bud the Fish, Johan de Ruiter, Abstract Productions, Michael Hoopmann, Merlin, Piptol, Typosoft, and many others. I haven't really talked to many of them these days though. If anyone wants to, they can drop me a line gberardi @ gbgames.com as I'd love to hear from you. No, that was not an opt-in for spam.

Asking via email what to write in a form which could be converted to an interview was needless. Gianfranco of GBGames sent me this letter in reply. Well, who said my article HAD to be an interview?

Visit Gianfranco's QB site GBGames, or anarky's site QBasic Network.

Searching For The Unknown
Astral Worlds by K.D.A.G. 2004

Written by Lachie Dazdarian

Welcome to the first article in a new series by Lachie Dazdarian called "Searching For The Unknown". In these articles, Lachie will search out and review rare and unknown QB games that deserve much more recognition than they're getting. This month, he takes a look at Astral Worlds by K.D.A.G.. Enjoy!

-Pete

About Astral Worlds

Astral Worlds is a very interesting game maker also featuring a very nice role playing/action game called Chief Dojoepa! but first I would like to start with a short prelude.

At the first glance I thought Astral Worlds was some sort of low quality and sloppy piece of work since the source code was not compiled and contained hard paths. For the program to work it's files supposed to be placed in c:\aws directory which is not a big problem itself since Astral Worlds was zipped as "aws" directory. But for someone who plays games on his D: directory and unzips games to directories he creates this can be quite a drag. Also, the user is not warned in any sort of documentation where the program has to be unzipped. Very user-unfriendly. Once I got rid of the hard paths and started the program my opinion about Astral Worlds completely changed.

Astral Worlds looks and feels very unique and unconventional. The graphic design is quite nice, featuring cool, mystic-looking menus and menu illustrations. Right from the main menu you will notice that Astral Worlds is different from most of the other QBasic games you've played. On the main menu you are asked to pick a world and since the original version of Astral Worlds features only one completed world/game(Chief Dojoepa!) you will probably click on it. After you enter a world you will be able to start a new game, load a previously saved game or edit that world. Simply the way editing of a world/game and starting a new game are interlined makes Astral Worlds special. Not that this kind of design is the smartest idea which I'll explain later.

I will start with the review of the world editor simply because Chief Dojoepa! is a product of it.

The World Editor/Game Maker

Astral Worlds is basically a game maker and Chief Dojoepa! only a game made with it and not an integral part of the program. I'm not sure if Chief Dojoepa! was planned from the beginning but Astral Worlds definitely benefits from featuring it. It shows the full potential of the world editor but also in some way hides it's flaws. On the end the world editor ends up being the weaker part of the Astral Worlds package which probably wasn't the original intention of the author.

To access the world editor simply click on "Edit This World" option once you pick a world from the main menu. Don't use Chief Dojoepa! world to test or play with the editor. Use one of the empty world slots(Untitled world).

The biggest positive aspect of the world editor is it's user-friendliness. It's a very intuitive and well designed game maker, easy and enjoyable to use. On the other hand, there are the numerous limitations. The main is that your game will be tile by tile scrolling and will feature Astral Worlds game screen design and the specific game mechanics. But I want to say something about the limitations of the very world editor first.

Each world you edit in Astral Worlds is consisted of four areas and each area is 50*50 tiles large. Each tile is 16*16 pixels large and each area features it's own 240 tiles. That's the most notable world editor restriction and this can't be changed, nor the tile size nor the map size. You might feel that it's impossible to create any kind of serious game with four 50*50 tiles large maps but if you try out Chief Dojoepa! you'll realize how mistaken you are. I really don't consider this to be the biggest problem of the world editor.

What you will notice first, after you access the tile/sprite editor("Edit Pictures" option in Area menu), is that all of the 240 area tiles have an already preset type(they are categorized). Tile slots are reserved for things like character sprites, objects(items), colliding and non-colliding tiles or animated tiles. You can change the tiles but not their type. So you can't use one animated tile to create an inanimate wall since it will be ALWAYS animated inside the game with it's other preset animation tiles(4 tiles make one animation). To prevent animation you would have to paste that wall tile in the remaining 3 tile slots used to create that specific animation. Same thing with using item tile slots to store your non-colliding tiles or anything else. You simply can't do that. You must draw your game items in those slots. And the number of non-colliding tiles is by my opinion too small. Also, you can't be sure which tile is colliding or not since you can't always decipher that from the "name" of the tile type. Half of "Land" type tiles are colliding while the other half is not. The fact that each world already features all the sprites and tiles drawn(mostly cool) you will be able to figure out, according to their look, which tile does what when put into a game. You will be mostly annoyed with the already mentioned tile categorization.

The very designing of the world you should start from the "World Properties" menu. In it you can change the title of the world(game), new game information(starting position, character's strength, items he caries, ...), start and end game book(text and pictures shown on the beginning and end of the game), world items, bombs and weapons. Start and end book feature is quite cool and allows you to create text and illustrations which are displayed in a form of a book on the beginning and end of the game. "Edit Intro" option allows you to edit a book displayed before each new game and "Edit Ending" option to edit a book displayed after the game ends. To create illustrations you can use one of the 240 tiles reserved exclusively for the start/end book graphic and don't have anything to do with the area tiles(you don't have to worry about tile types; we are talking here about non-interactive illustrations). This is a really cool feature in the world editor and I can't say nothing bad about it. What you will notice in "Edit Items" menu is that one world can only feature 6 different objects(items). This was a big disappointment to me. I should mention that items don't include keys, weapons or bombs. Keys have reserved slots in the tilesets and are used with a specific type of event(Key Lock). I'll explain implementing events later. Each item you can connect with one of the events you create. It can be from increasing player's health(food and similar items in your game) to player being transported to X, Y position(items like magic stones or teleporting devices). You will also notice in "World Properties" menu that your game can only feature 3 types of weapons and 2 types of bombs. I didn't find this too restrictive as the small number of items you can implement.

Inside every area menu you can edit the area map, add new events or edit the old ones, edit enemy characteristics, edit NPC characteristics, edit tiles/sprites and name tiles/sprites. Map editing is quite simple and does not require much comment. You pick tiles with right mouse button and place them with left mouse button. I should mention that you put movable objects, NPCs and enemies in the maps the same way as static tiles(no layers). By implementing movable objects in your game(they have a reserved place in the tilesets) you can create various Sokoban type of puzzles or even orient your game completely toward that concept. This easy way of implementing movable objects and characters into your game doesn't come without a price. Your sprites(from items to characters) and movable objects cannot feature a transparent background color.

Events are the heart of the world editor an allow you to put life into your game. Events range from change location/area, display text to neat events like small shops. Placing events in your game works the same way as placing tiles in the area map. Another cool feature is chain option which allows you to chain events. This is very useful if you want for an action or a place inside the game to trigger more events in the same time. Like if you want for some text to be displayed before you enter a dungeon(display text + change location or area). Although the event editor is powerful and well designed I found it lacking in some aspects. While working on The Unknown, a game demo I created while testing the world editor, I failed to find a way to prevent my character to use the communicator while he is inside the space ship. So the events you can implement were obviously not meant to suit complex adventure type of puzzles. Events are global for all the areas. What's good in the event placing and map editing menu is that you can switch to any area map while being in that menu.

Each area can feature 2 types of enemies and 6 types of NPCs(non-player characters). Inside the "Enemy Info" menu you can edit enemy characteristics(strength) while inside the "N.P.C. Info" menu you can edit the NPCs. Each NPC can feature up to 4 text messages given to the player if the player bumps with that character. You can also set if a specific NPC moves or not.

If we ignore that all tiles are categorized the very tile/sprite editor is ok. I only felt that a fill color option was needed. What is useful to know is that you can scroll through colors and tiles with arrows keys if you don't like using arrow icons inside the tile/sprite editor. "Name Pictures" option allows you to give a name to each tile in your game. This is important because the name of each object you bump into inside Astral Worlds game is displayed in a small text box in the right-bottom corner of the game screen. Unless you want for the word "Untitled" to display ever time you touch something in your game name your tiles and sprites.

Each game made with Astral Worlds world editor cannot be exported from Astral Worlds in any way which is another restriction. Like I said before, a game made inside the world editor is limited to tile by tile movement, Astral Worlds game screen and the game mechanics(way of using and equipping items, character features, text box). It would be cool if the user could change the look of the game screen(edit the borders and the shape of icons). Changing sprites and tiles in the "Extra" section inside the tile/sprite editor doesn't have an effects. This doesn't lower the quality of the world editor as much as the restrictions inside the very editor(number of items each world can have, tile categorization and similar) and the fact you can't export your game outside Astral Worlds. I just don't feel comfortable with my game being open for editing and butchering with an option right next to "Start New Game" option and with the fact I have to distribute it as part of Astral Worlds.

Astral Worlds is meant to be used for creation of RPG-like games but Astral Worlds is not your typical RPG maker nor a game made with it can be a typical RPG. Battles in Astral Worlds are real time and you can't implement any kind of long range weapon in your game(like guns). Astral Worlds doesn't feature the typical RPG experience based concept of character growth. Main game character only has maximum health, offence and defense points as changeable characteristics.

Overall, a very nice attempt. Might be suitable for kids who want to learn the basics of game design and can't code. The world editor is well designed and I doubt it can ruin anyone's sense or talent for game design. As for serious usage this editor simply fails to satisfy a more demanding user. I'm not saying you shouldn't use it. I just can't imagine someone being willing to cripple his game so much and leave it open for editing. But I doubt the designer ever had big expectations with this editor. The concept and the design of the editor show a lot of potential and this is something that really wouldn't be bad to remake and highly advance in FreeBASIC.

A note: From time to time, while working in the world editor, program might interrupt and return you to QBasic IDE. Don't worry, this happens very rarely and only upon entering a certain menu. Each time you leave any menu your changes are saved so no fear for your changes to be lost. You can usually return to the editor by pressing F5 in the IDE but not always.

⁵/₁₀

The Game - Chief Dojoepa!

Chief Dojoepa! is a game made inside the Astral Worlds world editor and it really shows the full potential of the editor.

Being an Astral Worlds game Chief Dojoepa! features a specific design of the screen, controls, battle system and tile by tile movement. The very in-game screen is well designed. It does feature a rather small map space, placed in the left part of the screen, but this only adds a certain charm to the game and I don't consider it to be a notable flaw. In the top-right part of the screen is the game inventory, item equipping controls and the status screen, with information about character's health, offence and defense points and score. In the down-right part of the screen is the text box, an important part of the gameplay. Text box is used to display various messages, from objects you bump into to dialogues. Also, this box is used in small shops and other places where you need to pick between few options.

Game graphic is one of the best parts of Chief Dojoepa! featuring well drawn and designed sprites and tiles. The graphic does seem a bit EGA-like but absolutely nothing negative you can say regarding it's quality. Not a single tile seems out of place or wrong. Astral Worlds doesn't allow for walk animation to be implemented in a game but you really don't miss it in Chief Dojoepa! All the characters are well and skillfully drawn and the attack(swing) animations are flawless. Since Astral Worlds allows four different areas per world this game features four different tilesets. On the very beginning of the game, after you leave your house, you might feel that the animation feature of the world editor was slightly abused since the village looks a bit like a carnival.

Chief Dojoepa! story is quite cool with not so common theme in computer games. It starts with a story about ancient Hiktite Indians who lived on a group of islands long time ago. They've built sacred giant pyramids and inside these temples drew upon secret knowledge from the astral world to protect their people. They've lived in peace and prosperity for eight hundred years until evil and malicious spirit Volgare pillaged the four Sun God temples and started creating monsters to enslave all the Hiktites. You play the role of Dojoepa, the protectors of the last Hiktite tribe, and have to stop the evil Volgare and save your people. Some people might find the story too cliché but it reminds me on the good old days when the stories were sweet, simple and, pardon my French, bullshit-free.

Chief Dojoepa! gameplay is pretty much the result of the world editor features. You will learn very early in the game that your goal is to find the 4 sun stones and to restore them on the sun altars in the sun temples. Uh, the Indians and their fixation with the sun. To accomplish that you will have to explore over 10 temples spread over 4 islands. To enter the sun temples you will have to find golden idols(they look like masks) in order to unlock them. Sun temples need from 1 idol up to 4 idols to unlock them. You start the game inside your house and you shouldn't leave it before getting the spear. Unfortunately, Dojoepa is drawn like he already caries a spear which might confuse some people. Just don't leave the house until you solve this "get the spear" puzzle and equip it. Battles in Chief Dojoepa! are real time. The very fighting is not rocket science nor it requires some skill. You simply need to meet with a monster and tap on the SPACE key. Not with some crazy frequency but reasonably fast. Not all prefer this kind of battle system but I found it more amusing than those typical RPG, turn-based battles. A matter of taste. Items that help you in your quest are berries, potions, coins and rune stones. With coins you buy or pay various things in the game and it's good to have them. I recommend you to collect and drop coins in one or few places inside the game since you never know when you might need them. Potions and berries help you to restore your health. I don't recommend using berries and potions unless you really need them(you are in the middle of some nasty temple) since they are more useful when used with various wells. Rune stones are very useful objects which have the power to bring you back home from any location but don't use them for that! Rune stones are crucial in making your character stronger. By dropping them in Wells of Offence or Defense you can increase your offence or defense points. Also, this is important, the well in your village restores your health for free! You just need to keep bumping with it. I missed that with my first two attempts to finish the game and almost gave up on it since I thought it was too difficult. It's impossible to finish Chief Dojoepa! if you don't use the well in your village to restore the health now and then. Chief Dojoepa! gameplay mostly consists of exploring various temples, finding golden idols to unlock the sun temples, finding sun stones and restoring them on the sun altars. You will also find keys which are crucial and rune stones which should be used to make your character stronger. During all that you need to avoid or kill monsters. Chief Dojoepa! is not terribly linear like Elysian Fields or Dies Irae(ugh!) but there is a certain order you need to follow to be able to finish it. It's advisable that you visit the sun temples by order(first the one that requires one idol to unlock it, then the one that requires two idols and so on). Still, Chief Dojoepa! allows a lot of freedom in sense of character growth, items usage and ways of exploring temples.

Another important part of the Chief Dojoepa! gameplay are movable objects, in this game stones and pillars, which on quite few places form Sokoban type of puzzles. What some might find annoying is that you can block a path to a certain important location, like a temple, and only find out later in the game that you can't finish it because of that mistake. This can be very frustrating but makes the game very challenging. You need to be very careful when pushing stones in this game and to save before doing that. There are two areas on the islands map which are tricky but not difficult. Read the strategy guide I wrote if you need help in that department. What makes Chief Dojoepa! even more challenging are secret passages and temples are full of them. You simply need to bump into a wall where you suspect for a secret passage to be. Another thing that some might find annoying while other a great feature which adds a lot to the challenge value of the game.

Two things I didn't liked in the gameplay. First, locked doors. There is no any logic in which door requires which key so in the later temples, with every new door you encounter, you have to try out every key you carry to find out which one opens it. Even one "puzzle" in a certain temple is based on a door labyrinth that requires nothing but patience in key switching. Second, monster reviving. On most of the locations, after you revisit them, monsters will be revived. This is also a matter of taste. I simply don't like this kind of feature in games. I want for monsters I kill to remain dead. By the way, monsters you kill don't increase you character's strength in any way, only your score.

You will meet a lot of NPCs inside the game which are a source of more or less useful information.

What K.D.A.G. really succeeded with Chief Dojoepa! is to create an illusion of space and diversity and you really feel that this game is much larger than four 50*50 tiles large maps. I can only applaud him for cramping so much content on so little space.

The spelling in Chief Dojoepa! is not that good and on few place slightly amusing. A small minus.

I found Chief Dojoepa! very immersing and addictive and finishing it a very rewarding experience. Not all might feel like I do and might consider Chief Dojoepa! too difficult but I can't say nothing else but recommend it. Over 10 hours(if not much more) of playing it and 3 attempts to finish it must mean something. Just have in mind that Chief Dojoepa! is a tile by tile scrolling game, without Sound Blaster effects and music and without spectacular graphic. Chief Dojoepa! is excellent gameplay in it's purest form.

⁶/₁₀

Conclusion

Astral Worlds is definitely something worth being downloaded. If for nothing else, then because of Chief Dojoepa! I hope I made someone curious enough to check out this interesting piece of work.

To download slightly edited version of Astral Worlds(some annoying bugs removed and few notable corrections like the removal of hard paths) with a strategy guide and a game demo made by me(The Unknown) inside the world editor click here: Astralworlds.zip

To download the original version of Astral Worlds(untouched by my dirty hands) click here: AWS1.zip

Both version run only from Windows 95(I think) and above(it works in Windows XP) and not from DOS since K.D.A.G. used spacing in names of his program files and DOS can't read that kind of files.

That was it for this first issue of Searching For The Unknown. Astral Worlds really took more time than I thought it would. For the next issue something more obscure, Star Trek: The Capture. I only played it for 30 minutes so far so can't tell what kind of game it really is. Stay tuned if you dare! :P

Visit Lachie's website, KENTAURI.

Project Updates
Qbinux, RapidQ and Legend of Aquarius

I had several extensive updates on various projects submitted this month, so I've created this new section for these articles. If you would like to share information about your project in the next issue of QB Express, send it along and your program can be featured in the next Projects column.

-Pete

Qbinux - Sebastian McClouth

This is my first article and English is not my native language, so excuse for any mistakes I might make.

What is qbinux?

It's just a simple UI (UserInterface) based upon Linux written (obviously) QuickBasic (editorial note: version 4.5). I call it a platform OS because it needs DOS to run, so it's some what similar to 4dos. The name of qbinux is, just as linux, the name of the main core.

Why qbinux?

To answer this question we have to dig back in time. When I started getting interested in programming in C (which I stopped, to start once again, a little time back), someone told me that MS-DOS (when everybody was using windows 3.11 or just fresh windows 95) was programmed with C. From that moment the idea of building an OS started to grow.

A couple of years later we got connected to the internet and I started browsing for programs made in qbasic, then I found some gui's.

But it wasn't until I read in a PC magazine about Linux, and actually getting my hands on a Linux version (Red Hat 5.1), that the old idea came back to build an OS.

The first attempts had gotten the name qbinux. A name which I thought of in a minute due the fact that I was trying to build a linux-clone in quickbasic.

qbinux core: a short explanation:

After having read several documents and the linux source code (and ofcourse several building attempts) I found on www.petesqbsite.com in the tutorial-section/magazine section 4 tutorials which I found really resourceful:

the first one, called "Making libraries" by Alan Copeland. With this tutorial I was able to build a library which contains all the needed core code, e.g. for the setup-program and even the UI.
the second one, called "Compiling" by WisdomDude. I used this one to build the qbinux.bi to contain all the module statements used in the qbinux library.
the third and fourth ones are called "QB scripting" by Chaoticmass and "Writing a simple BASIC interpreter" (part one, part two) by Vincent Peters. I have combined these codes in order to read the configuration files and qbinux scriptfiles.

I've been writing for over hour now so this is where I leave you all wondering about qbinux. If you want a copy of qbinux, you can mail me at balai_goyan@yahoo.com..

grtz

When you download the zip-file somewhere, you'll see I've included some part of these tut's in case you need to recompile/rebuild the whole thing.

RapidQ - Hezoe

Hi all. Today I'm going to tell you all about RapidQ. Please note that this is my first submission as I am relatively new to the QB (and FB) community.

RapidQ is a free multi-platform BASIC programming language. It can create text-only console, GUI and CGI applications.

RapidQ is very easy to use and great for beginners but can also create powerful applications. The integrated develpment enviroment (IDE) includes a useful form designer, requiring little coding, and syntax highlighting. A more advanced RapidQ file editor called Jens' File Editor is also available.

Unfortunately, the RapidQ was last updated by its develper, William Yu, in August 29th, 2000 and the source code has been old to REALBasic. The community for RapidQ is restrained a Yahoo! group which I am (in fact) not yet part of. The official RapidQ page is currently down, as is basicguru.com. So it quite hard to find support for RapidQ but a very detailed documentation is available.

Distributions are available for Windows, Linux, Solaris and HP-UX. The latest Windows version (BETA, .zip, 1.126Kb) and the documentation (312Kb) should be available on my website soon, if not already. I strongly encourage you to try RapidQ. Any comments can be sent to t.g@fresnomail.com .

TGSite is at: http://sitepalace.com/tgsite/.

Hezoe.

Legend of Aquarius - anarky

Official Site - http://www.qbasicnetwork.com/loa.htm

There has been no real progress since the game's announcement in issue 9. Real life issues have forced me to work harder and longer than I have ever done before, and as a result, 90-100 hours a week on the job for weeks on end is finally starting to take its toll. I guess I'm not cut out to milk so many cows AND run a site AND make a game. A web presence is a priority, so the game was thrown on the backburner.

Right now I believe you are thinking "Just another vaporware product." I beg to differ. We have a functional scripting engine, the storyline complete and pre-scripting is underway.

Pre-scripting?

You know the part where you start writing out the scenes, and all possible paths a character could take? But not writing it in a form the scripting engine can take? That's what we define as pre-scripting. (Stage 6)

To explain it better, here is our process:

Concept.
Preliminary plans - the stage where the idea is written down before it's forgotten.
Mental building - where the game is played as is written.
Flaw removal - tweaking the global story until it can be worked.
Repeat 3 and 4 as necessary.
Pre-scripting - the process of writing the scripting out as if you were watching a movie.
Profiling - for each character in the game, profiles are created, generally based on concept and scripting
Engine building phase 1 - we make a basic script engine.
Scripting - take the scripts from stage 6 and modify them to suit the engine.
Engine building phase 2 - modify the engine to suit the demands of the scripts.
Storyboarding - taking the scenes and drawing how we want them in the game. This helps also with a graphical representation of how it will look, thus highlight the demands for certain features.
Engine building phase 3 - taking the ideas from the storyboard and implimenting them.
Sprite and tile design - we draw basic images to be used, generally not animated or well drawn.
Testing stage alpha - testing the engine with some scenes written.
Engine building phase 4 - modify engine to include all features, bug fixing etc.
Artwork and music - adding the finishing touches...
Demo - strip the full game to demo and beta test.
Bug fix - meh.
Announce release in 2 weeks - ah the suspense is killing me!
Release - and be done with it.

I am itching to get in and start coding. But there is so much planning involved. I have an expected finish date of Christmas. It's good in a way that no one has hounded about the game, but just thought I'd give you an update anyway.

And who is the main character named after? One of the few little surprises we have cooked up for you!

>anarky

Review of Sokoban by Peter Bakota (Sorel)

Written by Zap

INTRODUCTION

This is Sokoban - It hardly needs an introduction. Or rather, it's Sokoban redone in FreeBasic, with a few new features. The download is 67KB, which includes over 300 maps (both the classical and other ones), well-written and commented sourcecode, and ofcourse the compiled game. You can download the game from this url.

I'm going to refer to this Sokoban as FB Sokoban throughout this review.

GAMEPLAY

The gameplay of FB Sokoban is well-known to everyone who have played computer games for more than 5 years, since it is exactly the same as classical Sokoban, hence the name. There is no changes in gameplay from it, and there need not be.

To those of you who have not have the chance to play the classical Sokoban (or any other port here of), I'm going to explain the concept, which is very simple yet entertaining: You control a character who has the abilities to walk around, and push at the boxes scattered around the level. Your sole purpose is to push all of those boxes onto specified positions in the level. This may sound easy, but very often you will find that you have made a mistake that will prevent you from completing the level. Sokoban requires you to think, and you will likely spend most of the time you play starring at the screen, wondering how the heck you are to complete that level!

Here enters a flaw of FB Sokoban: If you can't complete the level, one keypress will take you to the next. This might or might not have existed in the original Sokoban, I don't know that, but I definitely think it's ruining for the gameplay. Once you find that feature, you stop trying to complete the level; you stare at it, see if there's anything obvious, and if not, you just skip it. It removes any sense of completion, since there's no showing how many levels you've actually completed, and which you have skipped.

If that feature was removed, it would be natural to add a highscore aswell, since there would then actually be something to brag about in reaching level 50.

Gameplay Rating:
⁷/₁₀
The gameplay is not original, but that doesn't make it any worse, except for a single ruining feature.

LEVEL DESIGN

FB Sokoban has huge bunch of levels included, actually more than 300 of them. They will keep you busy for hours - if not days. There are all sorts of variations, for example a whole set consisting of only very small maps, and ofcourse there's also the classical map pack. The game works seamlesly whichever map pack you choose, and you can download new packs off the internet (the file format is a commonly used one for Sokoban games); check the readme file for more information on that.

I don't know if any of these map packs are made by the author himself, but I like the fact that he included them for playing.

Level Design Rating:
¹⁰/₁₀
They are good, challenging and there's a big bunch of them to keep you entertained.

GRAPHICS

The graphics in FB Sokoban is pretty simple. The player is represented with a circular smily-like creature, the walls are gray and well... wall-like, and the boxes also look abit like boxes. With that said, I have a few points where it could be improved.

First off, the player representation could use a loving touch. The smily creature gets boring to look at after a while, also because it has no real interaction with the boxes it pushes. There's no walking animation either, the smily just warps from position to position, and same goes for the boxes; not even a slide.

Secondly, the "inside" of the levels are just as black as the blackness that sorrounds them. Some floor tiles would have been nice.

However, even if these features would make the game more interesting to play, there's nothing wrong or gameplay-limiting with the current graphics, I'm just giving advice on how to make it better.

Graphics Rating:
⁵/₁₀
Simple, it works, but could be more interesting.

SFX & MUSIC

This often ignored side has been ignored once again. Considering how easy it is to add music and sound effects with FreeBasic, I'm really dissappointed that there is none. While this doesn't destroy the game in any way, it would definitely make this game even better. Some fitting background music, and effects when pushing blocks, moving, and so on.

Sound-side Rating:
⁰/₁₀
None, it would improve this game very much if there were.

CONCLUSION

I havent rated this game for originality or anything like that, since I'm just glad to see a well carried-out port of this game - and this one definitely is. It does have several points that could be improved on, however, for example actually having sound/music would greatly improve the game, and smaller things like animated player graphics would be nice too.

Overall Rating:
55%
Well carried out port, hours of gameplay, but has a number of points to improve on before this game is anywhere near perfect.

Visit FreeBasic.tk, or download FB Sokoban!

Interview With Sumo Jo

Conducted by Pete

A few weeks ago, I sat down with Sumo Jo, who among many other things is the new owner and administrator of QBasic News. We had a discussion (I wouldn’t quite call it an interview) about the state of the Qmunity following the traumatic shutdown of QBasic News last month. Hopefully it will answer some questions that you have about the details surrounding the event.

Here it is in all its glory.

-Pete

Pete:

Welcome Sumo Jo, and thanks for the interview.

Sumo Jo:

Glad to be here. With the last issue of your mag casting a bit of negative light on QBasic News, I wanted to write something or be interviewed in the next issue to restore people's faith in QBN.

How do you feel about QBN?

Pete:

Well, there was absolutely no reason for Wildcard to pull all that crap. He may own the site and server, but the content definitely belonged to the community. If he wanted to shut down the site or give it away to a new owner, that’s his decision – but deleting the site without warning was just a low blow.

Sumo Jo:

I agree, but sometimes people don't do the right thing when reacting to emotion. I understand how a lot of people feel as if they've had something taken from them. (I felt that way too.)

But I think Wildcard’s recent moves show he's able to make more mature decisions (even though they don't completely redeem him). Everyone makes wrong decisions. It just so happened his got to be in front of everyone, and affected many.

What kind of effect do you think it had/will have on QBN and community?

Pete:

Well, Wildcard ruined his and QBN's reputation in the mind of a lot of people – a great reputation that took him four years to build up. I think it's going to take a long time for QBN to return to what it was last week…let alone three months ago.

Sumo Jo:

Or a year. :-) (Although when Freebasic debuted it seemed to be at its most active peak since its earlier days.)

Pete:

Unfortunately for QBN, most of the mature, intelligent FB coders have moved to V1ctor's new Freebasic.net forums, and all of the colorful, opinionated people have moved to The Basic Network. The only people left at QBN as far as I can tell are people that don't hold grudges, a few newbies and... AAP. (heheh)

Sumo Jo:

Haha, yeah. I'm noticing that too.

Freebasic.net unfortunately was probably the best central location for FB community as that's where it came from. Although it spread fast on QBN, it never made sense that an unofficial site was the central hub for it. I’m not saying that it bothered me, it just seemed odd that it worked that way.

So I have a feeling now that it's set this way it'll be hard to change that back -- if possible. The TBN loyalty will stay as long as Nekrophidius convinces people that QBN is evil and he knows all. Not to bring back up the argument between Nek and Plasma on your board, but Plasma made the good point of how Nek who had left the community for all his home responsibilities was more than ready to reopen TBN within in minutes of QBN closing.

Pete:

Nek is a big hypocrite. He's "left" the Qmunity at least a dozen times since I've known him.

Sumo Jo:

Haha, agreed.

Pete:

He also rarely finishes anything he starts, but he starts about a dozen projects a week… (cough...V Planet!, Gaming Golds, FBXL…cough)

Sumo Jo:

Haha – another point agreed upon.

Nek has to have someone to cast stones at, or things don't work with him. Whether AAP, Wildcard, QBN or Plasma. Someone who "sets off his bullshit sensor". The all-knowing Nek already knew what would happen at QBN because he can predict all.

Pete:

Somehow though he's never gotten pissed off at me. I'm surprised. (Ed: He might after this!)

Sumo Jo:

I thought I'd get to see some Nek wrath after disagreeing with him about his crazy conspiracy ideas on QBN. Instead though, he agreed with me.

Pete:

I try not to get into flame wars with people... plus I do like Nek.

Sumo Jo:

I think he has a lot of potential but many downfalls. But who doesn't?

Pete:

Mike Doise. All downfalls there. Heheh.

Sumo Jo:

Haha. That was the only thing I made Wildcard promise when he said he would be transferring QBN. I said "even if you don't choose me, don't give it to Doise."

Pete:

Was there anyone else in the running to take over QBN?

Sumo Jo:

It was given to Dav who gave it to me to officially own. He's staying as admin but doesn't want full ownership. Jatos was also trying to get it very hard, he was actually going around to different people in the community wanting a partnership with them, but when he would talk to the next person he would explain that he didn't really want to partner with the last and really wanted just to partner with them. I think even though I told him many times that I had no intention of partnering with him, he seemed to think I did. He decided to PM Wildcard saying that he had partnered with me, Z!re and some others. Even though he told me he didn't want to partner with Z!re and he told Z!re he didn't want to partner with me, and didn't want me to get it.

Pete:

I'm sure Wildcard would have been glad to give the site to Z!re anyway, judging by their spat on the day that QBN shut down. ;-)

Sumo Jo:

Haha. Actually Wildcard and Z!re both have sent PMs back and forth forgiving each other and apologizing. Wildcard sai

Genre	Votes	Percent	Graph
QBasic News	10	24%
Basic Network	5	12%
Freebasic.net	3	7%
QB45.com	2	5%
Freebasic.tk	1	2%
Pete's QB Site	16	38%
Bad-Logic	0	0%
NeoBasic	0	0%
QBasic.com	5	12%
Other	0	0%
76 Total Votes

QB Express

Issue #11 ~ June 21, 2005

In This Issue

From The Editor's Desk

Written by Pete

Submit To QB Express

Letters

Letter From MystikShadows

Letter From anarky

Express Poll

What's your favorite QB / FB forum?

News Briefs

QB Site News

Project News

Other News

Gallery

Written by Pete

The Griffon Legend

How I Got Started With QB

Written by Matthew R. Knight

Review of Rattrapmax6's ASCII Scrolling Map Maker 1.0

A review by Stéphane Richard (Mystikshadows)

INTRODUCTION:

Functionality and features: 8/10 points

Layout and Disposition: 9/10 points

Suitability to the task: 8/10

Overall performance rating: 10/10

The Final Word

Making It Personal... A Thought On Flaming

Written by mennonite

Where Are They Now?Gianfranco Berardi

Written by anarky

Searching For The UnknownAstral Worlds by K.D.A.G. 2004

Written by Lachie Dazdarian

About Astral Worlds

The World Editor/Game Maker

The Game - Chief Dojoepa!

Conclusion

Project Updates Qbinux, RapidQ and Legend of Aquarius

Qbinux - Sebastian McClouth

What is qbinux?

Why qbinux?

qbinux core: a short explanation:

RapidQ - Hezoe

Legend of Aquarius - anarky

Review of Sokoban by Peter Bakota (Sorel)

Written by Zap

INTRODUCTION

GAMEPLAY

LEVEL DESIGN

GRAPHICS

SFX & MUSIC

CONCLUSION

Interview With Sumo Jo

Conducted by Pete

Where Are They Now?
Gianfranco Berardi

Searching For The Unknown
Astral Worlds by K.D.A.G. 2004

Project Updates
Qbinux, RapidQ and Legend of Aquarius