QB Express

Issue #15  ~  November 3, 2005

"A magazine by the QB community, for the QB community!"

In This Issue



From The Editor's Desk

Written by Pete

Welcome to the OCTOBER issue of QB Express!

...

...

Yeah, I know. It's November 3rd.

Sorry. My bad. Life caught up to me for a while, and I just couldn't find the time to work on QB Express...or fulfill other basic life necessities like eating, sleeping, or watching Survivor for a few weeks. Honestly, I still can't; that's why I'm up at 3:00 in the morning finishing off QB Express. But don't worry guys, I'll gladly give up a few more hours of sleep to get QB Express out for all of you QB/FB maniacs that have been chomping at the bit for Issue #15 ever since the fifteenth of October.

This month, there's some pretty awesome stuff in store for you. You're gonna love this issue, I know it. So without further ado, I present to you...

QB Express #15!

Submit To QB Express

You all know the drill. This magazine can't exist without people SUBMITTING articles, editorials, tutorials, reviews, news and feedback. This is not just a solo effort by me... it's a group effort by people throughout the QB community. If you have anything to submit, or have time to write something, DO IT!

If you want to write about something, but can't think of a topic, or need inspiration, check out the "Official QB Express Article Requests" thread! There have been quite a few articles requested -- and even if none of them strikes your fancy, we can help you come up with something that you would like to write about. If you're interested in getting your own monthly column or just want to write an article or two, by all means, do it! Anything that is submitted will be included!

I also want feedback and letters to the editor regarding this magazine. I want suggestions and critiques. What do you like? What don't you like? What could be done better? Let me know!

All submissions and feedback can be sent to pberg1@gmail.com. You can also PM me on the Pete's QB Site or QBasic News message forums. If QB Express is going to continue to be so good, YOU need to contribute!

-Pete



Letters

Letter From MystikShadows

Hi Pete,

*Picks up his Jaw and puts it back in it's place*

ASCII World made the Site Of the Month!? Wow Lurah and I were talking recently and making it to Site of the Month was what we wanted to do and look at that, it happened. Now we'll keep at it to see if we'll make it to site of the year and get Adigun's outstanding site of the year plaque ;-). It's quite an honor to have been chosen, and to see that if you put the effort, you will be rewarded :-). That surprise made my day and I know it made Lurah's day too. But I do have to say that the more recent activities were more caused by rattrapmax6's project, we've been busy, but so has he as you know, with his scrolling map maker and his other text projects. The Site of the month goes to him too :-). I'm honored to have him onboard our ASCII cult (err you can cut that part out if you want lol). Seriously though, from your description it looks like ASCII World is giving the exact impression that we're aiming for. That's awesome to know :-).

Just when the world (err the Qmunity realistically lol) thought this issue would fit on a single printed page so to speak, along comes you and the contributors and you guys manage to make a very surprising issue considering, like you said, it's state 2 days before the deadline date. Way to go people absolutely amazed every month at what makes it into every single issue. Even if it's as close a call as it was. It was all worth the wait and stress because just at the quality of the issue, absolutely impeccable. :-). The newsbriefs are still growing I see. [PLUG] For everyone, my offer still stands, if you want to make the news but don't have time to write about, send me the info, or just the link and I'll create the newsbrief for you, you don't need to waste time on that part and you can continue to spend your time on what you want to do, I'll take care of it ;-) [/PLUG]. srichard@adaworld.com is where you can send the info to. There's a lot going on in there. More and more things are becoming available for us FreeBASIC coders, it's absolutely amazing. It's always awesome to see it all happen.

The reviews were outstanding. All reviewers seems to have given a good, thorough and detailed review of their selected projects. I think I'm being selfish in my reviews ;-). When I say that, I mean i review stuff I like to play or like to use. So I tend to give them good scores I think. I'll have to try to be a bit more unbiased in them. But if you've seen rattrap's ASCII Map Maker 2.5, I think you'll agree it's an outstanding tool to use. :-).

I knew the Rogue Competition was busy. But I didn't know there could be so many types of rogue like games! Wow, I'm glad I won't be a judge in this competition. I vote if there's a poll of course, but wow, they have been busy, very busy.

I totally agree with Matt2Jone's letter. What he says is true, I've seen it myself, and I wonder how the victim feels in all this. Some really do deserve what they get, but others might be looking to really learn and I think there are better ways to keep their interest in programming than some of the stuff I've seen replied. If you don't want to help, don't flame them or send them to hell, let someone else answer, it should really be simple. I'm thinking something like. Imagine this: A new user that just heard of the praises of the Qmunity joins one of the forums, he gets flamed for whichever reason, another new member comes aboard and sees that he's been flamed, hence doesn't talk to him/her because he thinks they're trash, that's how you build or destroy an online reputation. Who's to say, this early those new member's presence in the forum, that they deserved this kind of reputation? As for myself, what I do when I see a new poster, even if he asks to do his homework is first start by seeing what it's all about. In this multicultural society of ours, I've had teachers I simply couldn't understand no matter how hard they tried to explain. Not all teachers are gifted in the area of teaching. Sure many of those new posters really do just want their homework done and be done with it, don't want to learn etc. etc. But I don't believe each and every one of them deserve the same treatment. So I PM them and see why they are asking us to do their homework. I've helped, in PM, many of those newbies for the reasons I gave in this paragraph. Many of them simply didn't understand the concepts that were required by the "homework" because the teacher either never explained it, never got to it or simply couldn't explain it simply. So I explained it to them and a lot of them were ready to do their work once I was done with them. If I see they are wasting my time, I just stop helping them. (those are the REAL nOObz :-) ). But I haven't been in this Qmunity as long as most (although I'm now nearing two years ;-)). Maybe some of you are burnt out from the nOObz lol. But I don't plan on changing my way.

Mennonite's "It's Been A Dark Month, Hasn't It?" really left a mark. Although I don't think it's been a dark month (looking at this issue, it hasn't been a bad month at all :-). However it doesn't take anything away from his positive thoughts he projects through his letter. Everyone should print this letter and read it (and reread it too) whenever they fell like giving up. It's one of the most motivational and powerful article/letters I've ever read. It says a lot about mennonite himself. Wish more people had that kind of thinking. :-).

I just can't help but enjoy Deleter's highly unique point of view in his articles. He's among the rare that can get a point across to the reader in a very realistic but also funny way. I'm looking very forward to others of his creations (hint, hint lol). He's just always a good read.

Matt2Jones' music series continues I see, that's just excellent. I'm a keyboard player and I really enjoy the way he explains music, it's proven quite informative to say the least. Torahteen really did a good job in this part of his "A* Implementation in FB: Part 2" he wanted to make a better, more professional tutorial, and I think he achieved that quite nicely. "C++ For The BASIC Programmer" by TheAwakened is pretty well done to. If you really want to use FreeBASIC to it's fullest, it won't hurt to learn at least a little C++ as many of the libraries/engines are coded in C++ so I definitely liked this one for those reasons. Ally Artificial Intelligence by John Wallace, what a perfect way to continue his AI series, when I read his first part, on enemy AI, I was wondering how he could follow that, ally A.I. never crossed my mind at the time, now that I read it though, I don't think he could have chosen a better subject for his second part.

In all parts, the issue was of exceptional quality once again, and I still see it going nowhere but up :-).

As always, I am going to reread this, see how much more I can sink into this brain of mine. Awesome work once again to everyone!

-MystikShadows (Stephane Richard)

In response to your thoughts on dealing with newbies, I agree with you: nobody should ever flame someone that asks a simple question. This is a small community, and we need as many members as we can get. However, I also think that people that ask questions have a certain responsibility to first try to answer their question on their own (by consulting tutorials, other forum posts and the QB help file), and then if they still need help, making sure that they answer their question in a thorough, intelligible way so that we know exactly what their problem is. When a newbie asks an unspecific or difficult to answer question, that's when they get flamed. I would say that it's way better to ignore questions of these sorts than to respond in a way that you know will not be helpful to anyone. (ie: "RTFM") Now, if you post the equivalent of "RTFM", and couple it with a link to a tutorial that will answer their question, that's a different story entirely. In general, I think that is the best way to deal with questions from newbies.

Great letter once again, from QB Express's #1 contributor! I'm sure I'll be hearing from you a few hours after I release this issue. :)

-Pete

Letter From Lachie Dazdarian

Pete,

I read in issue #12 your thanks to MystikShadows for his pre-formatting of his articles. First of all, I didn't know you could do that. I didn't know you could do that one article at a time. Shows my lack of HTML knowledge. You really should ask people to pre-format their articles if they want and can because I think most would do it. It gives them a chance to see how their article will look in the magazine and have more control over the formatting. I'm sure that most want to make editing QB Express less stressful for you (I know I do). Let's hope Adigun will read this. ;)

I will definitely do this in the future and thanks to MystikShadows' html files from the zipped issues of QB Express I know all I need to do the pre-formatting. Anyway, sorry I was unable to do this with my latest articles/reviews.

Another thing is your free time which will decline to "almost none at all" as you say in the issue #13. I know that I have no right to tell you how you should run your life but I was disappointed to read how you committed yourself on so many obligations which you really didn't have to. I would hope you would take editing QB Express more into consideration when allocating your free time since you express your love for the magazine so much. And believe me, by committing yourself to some of these obligations that are not "must do" you have allocated your free time to something other than QB Express. Also, I think that there is no need to force release dates so much. It's not like you have some publisher watching over you. I don't see what is so wrong in 40 or even 50 days passing between issues because of your limited time at that point. It's not a great thing but not something to break your head over. The community shouldn't thrive only because of QB Express. Actually it should be the opposite but we can't have that all the time. In the end, you don't owe anyone anything. I hope that you won't force issues so much and even release some few weeks after the last one just because the last one was a bit over the deadline. This really isn't necessary.

I see you have huge problems doing the news section and I'm really sorry I can't help there due my limited time on the net. What I think would help is some kind of News Box which everyone who has a site and updates it is advised to use it and post news in it. I think it would save you some time since you wouldn't have to check sites that have submitted news and would move responsibility of reporting news away from you and on to the newsmaker. Not only the site owners who update their sites should use it; everyone who thinks that he or she has something interesting to report could use it. Maybe that would lead to news inflation. I don't know. I'm not saying that this News Box should be a substitute for your or someone else(let's hope you'll find help) look-out for the news but it would save you some time.

I won't comment much on the last two issues but I should say that Adigun's work in the one year anniversary articles was excellent. I think his style is getting more coherent but it could just be me getting used to it. Whatever it is his articles are becoming a delight to read.

And thanks to both of you for mentioning my work so many times. My reviews are far from perfect especially in the grammar department and in my limited vocabulary but every new article is an opportunity to do better. I only realized with the last articles that I was using Simple Past Tense incorrectly. How embarrassing. And just few days ago I also realized that I'm using the word "graphic" incorrectly. This forces me to re-check my old articles and correct them. Since I'm a perfectionist I will open a website very soon with all my reviews corrected and the site design will be very similar to the one in QB Express.

I also want to apologize to everyone for reacting stupidly to your interview with Sumo Jo. After reading Na_th_an's letter, other comments, and the interview with Nekrophidius, I've got clearer picture of the situation and what was wrong with my comments. All I can say is that after the issue #12 I'm a bit smarter today (and I'm not talking about the tutorials). We never stop learning, eh?

What happened to the ASCII Summer Demo Compo? Well I know I won it (by default; one entry) but I'm surprised there was no news about it in the issue #12 since it was mentioned two times in previous issues(even an article about it in the issue #9). Lurah really did a poor job in managing the compo. We should all learn something from this. Don't start a compo when you are very busy. Anything else can be postponed but a compo can't.

What else...? Ah!

I've noticed many people having problems reading QB Express in Firefox. Isn't it possible to install more the one web browser on a PC? QB Express works great in Internet Explorer and maybe those people should download QB Express and read it offline in Internet Explorer, if they think that IE is so unsafe. I don't have a connection back home so it is a great pleasure to download QB Express at college and then read it home in IE, offline, in peace.

Anyway, I'm sending you a review of The Griffon Legend (how boring). I'm not sure if I'll be able to finish the next issue of Searching For The Unknown column for issue #15. This was a bit busy month for me which is partly my fault since I failed a certain exam and have to repeat it today. Also, I had to do this terribly annoying and draining medical testing for the military service for the third time (and it?s the last time, luckily). I was temporary unfit for the military two times before. I don?t know if any of you have been tested for the military but it's NOT the usual medical exam you have to do for driving the car or similar. It's comforting to know that I've gained 14 kg during the last year (it happened over few months) and now I have 63 kg(my height it 185 cm). Wohoo! I'm such a fat pig. Working out rules! The nurse who took my blood this time was unusually frisky. Ouch! The psychiatrist is another story. Hmm?does this interest anyone? Hardly.

Cheers!

Lachie D.

P.S. -- Does anyone know how to get rid of the Paint Shop Pro 7 registry files? They are driving me crazy! They keep giving me a message that I?have exceeded my trial period. Nothing helps. I went through the registries MANUALLY and removed everything that had something to do with PSP, re-installed it and it still didn't help. I never experienced something like this. Crazy! The crack sucks! (I don't want to hear any lectures about copyright) This leaves me currently without a 32-bit drawing program. Can you recommend something to a penniless person? Send help to lachie13@yahoo.com :P

Thanks for the great letter. Lots of awesome suggestions!

A few quick responses...

Thanks for pre-formatting. I'm not going to require it (since I think it might limit the number of submissions), but obviously I greatly prefer it since it saves a lot of time.

As for my free time situation, don't worry about it. I can manage a lot of things at once. QB Express is near and dear to my heart, but so are all of the other activities I'm involved in. Truth be told, programming and web design are an interest of mine, but they are not my passion. Television and cinema are what I want to do with my life, and what I am going to school to study. Most of my free time is spent making television shows for my college's TV station (which is also broadcast to the rest of our county). I am the creator/producer/director of a cartoon called "Unicorn Boy," the director of a live studio-based movie reviews show ("The Screening Room"), and the director of photography for a mockumentary show about student safety officer ("Better Safe Than"). Plus I am the webmaster of our official site, ictv.org . I love making TV. So I have all this, plus I take five classes and do all of the work / projects / studying, manage my QB site, my other Oh Cany Productions site, and do QB Express. But I can handle my commitments. I'm pretty good at time management.

Unfortunately, though, if something has to be pushed back, it's going to be QB Express. QB Express's release date is the one deadline that I have complete control over. Self-imposed deadlines are just too easy to break if you're in a bind, and I am regularly.

As for the news briefs, the only real way to do it is to search out the news by hand and write about it. In my experience, if I ask people to send in news to the magazine, they simply won't do it. I can set up all types of forms and infrastructure for news submissions, and only a handful of people will actually use it. So this won't work for covering all the news that I want to cover in the mag. Besides, the most interesting news stories are the more obscure ones that can only be found in individual forum posts, that the authors oftentimes wouldn't even consider "newsworthy."

Anyway, thanks for writing great reviews and always giving good feedback.

Take it easy.

-Pete


Another response from our proofreader, urger / Peter Lenz:

Lachie, don't worry about your English writing skills, I had to do little to get this article proofed. About your problem with PSP. You may wish to use GIMP. It's free, open source software (the best kind) and opens every image file format I've ever encountered. It may take some getting used to after PSP, but I feel the legality of it is more then worth the switch.

-Peter (urger)

Letter From Seb McClouth

Hi Pete

While reading the newsletter I’ve seen that people wrote regular letters. And today I thought to myselfs, let’s write one too.

First and all, I’d like to say what a joy it was to find an active community of Basic programmers.

I’ve been programming since I was about 9 years old, just real basic stuff. I believe it was actually my mom who taught me a bit. I had this keyboard, similair to an Commodore 64, which I could hook up to my tv.

I only knew how to use PRINT, FOR… NEXT, A$ =””, that about sums it up.

I thought it was sumfin really special (I still consider it is).

When I had my first real PC (about 10 years late), a huge laptop, a Toshiba 3200, I found qbasic in C:\DOS. Along with the PC I had a old STAR LC 200-colour (yes, with those old-and-fancy chainpaper) which I used to print out the complete help of qbasic.

I was writing some dumb programs which I thought off they were really cool. One of the coolest (which I didn’t find that dumb) was my ASCII-clone of Windows for Workgroups v3.x. I still have that code lying around. Now-a-days I laugh with it but when I wrote it, it was state of the art to me.

One year later we got connected to the internet at home and I browsed around looking for qbasic files. I downloaded lots of files, of pages which don’t exist anymore. In that time I was still programming ASCII-programs.

The graphical programming was not really my thing then. I found QuickBasic 4.5, like most of ya, somewhere. I downloaded, installed it on my 386 (yes, I know, in those days we had the first pentium up and running, I just didn’t have one myselfs) which was quite marvelous, it had about 16MB RAM, a 40 MB harddrive (later I added a 80 MB to install windows 95). About 2 years later I installed Linux Red Hat 5.1 on it. It was running a lot faster then windows did.

About 6 months later I got my first pentium. A Pentium I, 100Mhz with a 1 GB hardrive and about 64MB Ram. Running like train. So I thought. Well I had Linux installed once again and what a marvelous sight it was. Until I gotten a Pentium I, 166Mhz. It had about 92 MB Ram and a 3,4 GB Harddrive. Programming with QB had made place for programming with Visual Basic but I just wasn’t really happing.

3 years back I returned to Qbasic thanks to some old DOS-systems, currently a IBM Thinkpad, on old, which was capabile of running Windows 98, but anywayz… When browsing on the internet once more I found several Basic-communities. After a long while I found Petes site. After a couple of days I found this site to be really usefull in my attemp to create an OS (platform OS, as I call it, since it more sumfin like a shell).

Pete, keep up the good work.You’re running the best site I’ve ever seen on Basic.

On my behalf I wish you the best!!

Seb McClouth

Thanks for all the kind words! I can't wait for the next version of Qbinux!

-Pete

Letters from mennonite

I got several letters from mennonite in the past few days...

I hope you're alive

every day around this time i wait for the "qb express [#} is now available!" post on our subforum, and i haven't seen it. jesus, i hope you're okay.

actually, pete, i love qbe, but i've pretty much abandoned hope. i'm not suggesting you do the same, but i would understand. it's all good. as far as i'm concerned, no one other than you, mac, rel, and v1ctor contributes more to qbasic. you're the four horsemen of qb- imo.

but freebasic (for dos) has shown me things i can only see on my computer, and i love them too much to go back to only qb. and fb just kicks my ass around too much, like when i tried to learn c :( i'm very depressed. and i'm also depressed about everything else that's happening. and i thought, one more time, i'd share my thoughts on things... they're pessimistic, but i always hope the world will prove me wrong. i really do:

[ShadowWolf's post from the qbasic forum]

i disagree one thing Mac neglects to comprehend is that...there is no separation between QB and FB as a community and Qbasic.com has been the flagship page like it or not for the QB community. it is also the birth place of the QB community it tied together all the rouge pages for qbasic.

no a redesign of the Page must be true to the Community not the language it based around. Qbasic.com is this community father and Freebasic is part QB community it more then part of it, it is it there is no separation.

when FB was created QB community was dieing FB revitalized it and rebuilt it for me it was like watch a dieing person come back to life so naturally the majority of the QB community transition to FB so when you look at the FB community your really looking at the QB community. and to not representing FB with in the redesign of Qbasic.com you will be in essence alienating the largest component of the QB community.

i'm not advocating a convetion to FB but a blending simler to that of Pete's QB Site

Posted on Oct 29, 2005, 5:48 PM


[my reply]

you must not notice this is the last refuge for the newbies abused everywhere else in the "community." imo, the best argument for qbasic.com being seperate from the so called community is that here they are treated with kid-gloves. there have been exceptions. qbnz has a no RTFM policy but i've never seen much of qbnz.

on the other hand, after coding for two decades i am STILL one of the newbies who would have to take a lot of crap in other forums. i like petesqb- a lot- but there is a reason i spend most of my time here. pete berg has the best qbasic site there is- it's to qbasic what yahoo is to the internet. but mac has the best forum... for qb.

any excuse to keep this place separate (or even older-fashioned) from the "community" while i'm principally against it, may specifically be the only reason a REAL "community" remains at all. i used to think there was a qb community outside of this forum. but i think the term "clique" would probably apply better.

and if you insist on the term "community," why not be more accurate with: "anti-qb community" instead? like i was saying, mac's reasons for being protective might be misplaced... but he's probably doing the right thing anyway.

Posted on Oct 29, 2005, 6:23 PM

-mennonite

And then, mennonite sent me his scathing article about FreeBasic, which you should read in order to understand these next few emails.

Before I got a chance to respond to mennonite's first email and his article, I got this email.

You Don't Have To Run That

it figures doesnt it?

as soon as i sent that shadowwolf started helping me with fb.

i'm still unhappy. assuming you are alive and online :( you're probably WAAAAAAAAAY behind on qbe.

that's a pretty scathing article. i'm still annoyed, really. although i don't think the fbmunity (:P) deserves it.

it's almost a shame that i've ALREADY been proven "wrong" to a degree, although a lot of the sentiment remains. there is one point i think i'll stick to tho. even if you don't run it, it is probably going to be my last qbe article for a long, long time, at least. thanks again, pete.

And then just a few minutes later, I got this email:

nah yknow? i dont fuckin care- go ahead!

this is my last email.

fuck your whole stupid so-called "community."

fuck everybody in it. i don't care who you are.

some fucking cretin java programmer who claims you need OOP to spam a forum covered our forum in posts that said so today.

*I* can write a program that SHELL's to wget to spam our own forum. with phpBB it's harder, or there would be a program up right now that spams other forums.

using qb.

oop is a method, not an ability. any idiot knows that. you can code a while fucking oop langauge without oop.

i'm fucking fed up with people pretending to be part of something they deride.

i'm fucking sick of all the bullshit.

fuck the "qmunity" - a bunch of stupid children with nothing better to do - than the equivilent of high school boys running into the boys locker room in junior high and saying "hey look, our penises are 1/2 inch longer than yours."

whoo! there's a difference.

the lot can eat shit.

fuck 'em.

bye.

I don't think mennonite wanted me to publish these, but screw it. He hit a nerve with me, and I want to respond.

Publicly.

So here it is:

mennonite, I'm don't like your anti-FreeBasic attitude, and I disagree with you completely on the entire issue -- but I can live with that. What I can't stand are your constant jabs at the Qmunity for switching to FreeBasic.

Now this might come as a shocker to you, but: I don't like QBasic. I quit programming in QB in late 1999, and haven't looked back. I haven't programmed *anything* of my own in QB since. QB is so damn slow, limited and fickle. And now that the majority of the world is using Windows XP, I see no point in coding in QB, since chances are, my program won't even run for the majority of my userbase. Ever since I came to the revelation that I dislike programming in QB, I stopped using it.

So why do I run a QB programming site, make this magazine, post on message forums, etc.? It's not because I find QB programming particularly fun or engrossing. It all comes down to the community.

What I am interested in, and have always been interested in, is the spirit of QBasic programming. I love the idea of homebrew game programming, and I especially love the community surrounding it. To me, it's not the programming language or the technology that matters, but rather, the end products: the programs and games. QBasic is empowering to its users because it's so easy to learn, and it can result in some very fun, entertaining programs, that are itching to be shared among the community.

Your allegations that FB is unpolished, difficult to use, and missing features because it's still in beta, are unfounded. FB is what QB programmers have wanted ever since Windows 95 came out: a fast, expandable, multi-platform 32-bit compiler that keeps the formatting and simplicity of QBasic's syntax. There's nothing of significance that you *can* do in QB that you *can't* do in FreeBasic. FreeBasic + FBIDE is just as user-friendly as the QB IDE, and also (get this) works on my computer. QB and the many of the DOS-based programs it produces simply don't run on my Windows XP system. If every QB program in existence were converted to FB, I would be overjoyed. I hate jumping through hoops to get software to work properly. Nostalgia be damned. FreeBasic isn't QBasic, it's better.

The fact of the matter is that FB creates better end products, and that's why I support the switch: the programs are not DOS-based, and that means that I can actually run them on my Windows XP box. That's really all it comes down to. I want to use programs made by spirited amateurs of the Qmunity (whom I consider to be my friends). I could care less about the platform. If the Qmunity all of a sudden switched to Java programming but kept the same attitude, I wouldn't bat an eye. It's not like the past QB games are gone, and it's not like the face of the Qmunity has changed: we're still all the same guys. The platform is irrelevant.

And now for your other main argument...

You say that aside from the folks at The QBasic Forum, the rest of the Qmunity is uncooperative, cold, unreceptive of newbies, and "the equivilent of high school boys running into the boys locker room in junior high and saying 'hey look, our penises are 1/2 inch longer than yours.'" What the hell are you talking about? The people in the QB and FB programs are more than helpful to people, as long as they're not (a) asking stupid, vague questions that are impossible to answer; (b) making total assholes of themselves; or (c) asking us to do their homework for them. The FreeBasic.net, FBTK, Pete's QB Site and QBasic News forums are full of extremely helpful people and nearly everyone who asks a specific, intelligent question will be helped.

And what's wrong with RTFM responses? There's nothing that pisses me off more than people asking questions that I end up answering myself with a ten second Google search. Everyday someone comes onto my site's forum and asks a question where there has already been a full tutorial written on the subject that will tell them everything they need to know. Shouldn't we hold programmers responsible to at least check their resources before posting questions and wasting our time? I know that personally, I barely ever ask for programming help, because 99% of the time, I can find my answer by searching existing sources. Why do people have such a hard time reading the fucking manual? I don't blame the people that post "RTFM" or "Consult the QBasic Help file" or "Pete's QB Site has over 600 tutorials -- why didn't you look through those first?" Before anyone asks a question, they should at least make an effort to figure it out on their own. Most of the newbies that get berated are berated because they don't have basic netiquette.

Anyway, I'm not going to resort to swearing like you did to me and the Qmunity -- but I'll be blunt: you're wrong. The rest of the QB community has been pretty rational about FB, and only "The QBasic Forum" has flipped out about the new compiler. I consider you and your anti-FB cronies to be a fringe group that refuses to adapt to the changing world because you're too absorbed in tradition and "the old way." You're like the Amish: still living with no electricity and horses and buggies because it works. You're just too set in your ways. Computer technology has advanced past DOS, and it has gotten way better. You're the only person I know who thinks a DOS command line interface is more "user friendly" than Windows. And you're way too angry and defensive about the whole thing.

Not a single one of your reasons for not switching to FB works for me. Nobody It's clearly a better compiler than QB. And I think you're a major douchebag for ripping on the Qmunity like you did. I'm sure most of the readers would agree.

-Pete

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


Express Poll

Every issue, QB Express holds a poll to see what QBers are thinking. The poll is located on the front page of Pete's QBasic Site, so that's where you go to vote. Make sure your voice is heard!

What is your favorite finished FB game?

GameVotesPercentGraph
ArKade00%
Battle Pong36.5%
Bounce12.2%
The Griffon Legend1941.3%
Poxie715.2%
The Quest For Opa Opa32.2%
Red Jumpy Ball12.2%
Rambo vs. Kitty Cat36.5%
Sokoban FB00%
Other919.6%
46 Total Votes
Now that FreeBasic has been out for nearly a year, many finished FreeBasic games have been released. Syn9's popular action-RPG The Griffon Legend was the clear winner in this poll, with Lachie Dazdarian's Poxie being the runner-up. "Other" was another popular category, since this list certainly doesn't reflect all of the FB games released, but only the most popular (by my own estimation). Anyhow, it's due time that somebody makes a FreeBasic games website to help us keep track of all the great FB games that have come out from this community in the past year. So get on that!


News Briefs

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

QB Site News

QBasic.com Under New Management

After over six years of false alarms, eBay auctions to sell the domain, and failed squatting attempts, QBasic.com has finally changed hands. A guy named Mark Wilhelm was able to register the domain, and has since put up a barebones splash page that links to a new forum, the old forum at Network 54, and a mirror of the old QBasic.com site. In his announcement about his purchase of the domain, he asked the community for help in creating a new QBasic.com website.


The new QBasic.com logo.

As soon as the announcement was made, several debates began, the biggest about whether QBasic.com should also feature FreeBasic content, or should remain strictly QBasic-focused. Many believe that FB is simply the next version of FB, and that it's only natural for the site to be a blending of QB and FB, similar to what you see at QBasic News or Pete's QB Site. Others, such as V1ctor, advocated keeping the site with a QBasic focus, but linking to FreeBasic sites and providing some "education" to visitors that there was a modern 32-bit BASIC compiler.

Meanwhile, many of the visitors at the current QBasic.com forum, The QBasic Forum, got very defensive regarding the domain name, since their forum being linked to by QBasic.com is what has kept it alive and kicking for so long. If the link is removed, newbies will no longer flood the forum, and its visitation rate will drop through the floor.

Others met the switching of QBasic.com's ownership with hostility. When I found out about the switch, I wrote: "I really hope he makes a good site with that domain name. He's instantly going to get the most traffic of any QB site, be listed first in all of the search engines, and attract almost all the newbie QB coders...so if there's a bad site up there, it's a real shame. He's got a real responsibility to make QBasic.com something good, since it's such an important domain."

I wish Mark all the luck in the world -- but I am a bit worried about the fate of the new QBasic.com. Mark will be starting this site essentially from scratch, and hasn't really created any QB site of note to this point. So far, I extend him the benefit of the doubt, but I have seen nothing yet to indicate that he's got the credentials to manage this highly desirable domain.

News Brief by Pete


Lachie Dazdarian's Articles and Reviews Site

Lachie Dazarian recently created a website where he will be featuring his articles and reviews. As most of you readers know, Lachie has written reviews of games and has his own series on QB Express called "Searching for the Unknown". You can now find them on a new site create by Lachie specifically for the reviews and articles.

The site can be found here: http://www.kentauri.digitalblackie.com/articles/

The website features a design that is close to the know well known QB Express layout but under a different color palette which I find quite nice, easy enough on the eyes so that readers won't get a headache after reading the material. If you want to see his material, I encourage you to pay a visit to his website and get reading. There is some very interesting material already and I'm sure more to come as well.

News Brief by MystikShadows


QuickBASIC Gui Networks Opens

Chad Dweller, maker of Linster OS, a QB GUI project, just very recently opened a new QB GUI related website. There were only two, so he decided he would be the third. It's all new so there isn't much content GUI wise. He does have his own GUI there however and the organization of the website seems great navigation wise, let's hope that with time he will get enough contributions from people to be considered a good QB GUI reference. The URL for his website is http://www.linster.moved.in/qbgui/guppy/ Take a look, it's well on its way :-).

News Brief by MystikShadows


"Enter" Section from 3-2-1 Contact Magazine

The '80s and early '90s educational kid's magazine 3-2-1 Contact is back! (kinda). There are 111 scans of "Basic Training" articles from 3-2-1 Contact magazine available at the following link, courtesy of Michael Birken. I'll be adding this to the QB Zines section eventually. (WARNING: *HUGE* file...don't download unless you really want it): 321contact.zip

Here's some info from Mike about the scans:

Pete,

The "Enter section" in 3-2-1 Contact magazine evolved from Enter magazine. If you never heard of it, check out this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enter_%28magazine%29

Over time, the Enter section got smaller and smaller and soon only "Basic Training" remained. And then that disappeared completely. There were some really cool programs in there some times. I couldn't find the issue, but there was once a variation of Lunar Lander. The game required you to get a flying saucer through a jagged cave by only tapping on the space bar. Each tap initiated your rocket booster to momentarily fight gravity.

You should make a call out for more scans. It would rock if we could locate all the issues of Enter magazine itself.

- Mike

Shortly, this archive will be added to the Pete's QB Site "Zines" section.

News Brief by Pete


Two Generous Offers from Todd Suess

For those of you that might not know Todd Suess, just take a look at his website at Todd's QB GUI Review website and you might remember that it received the site of the month award on QB Express #12. Todd is a very active member of the QB GUI scene with his review website, his own GUI project called Millenium OS and all the help and suggestions he gives to anyone thinking or working on their own GUI projects.

After exchanging a few Private Messages, he let me know that he had just created a forum specifically designed for people wanting a forum for their GUI projects but that didn't want to create their own website and/or forums just for the sake of their project. Todd create Data Components Forums. Basically, if you are thinking of creating a GUI project for yourselves, if you have a project and would like a forum dedicated to bringing you your own section for your project so you don't have to host a forum yourselves and if you're curious about current GUI development projects, you must visit Todd's forum.

Todd also added that he has created another concept to offer free webhosting to anyone who needs it. Have a look at Metronic Hosing (BETA) which offers 15Megs of free webspace to anyone that signs up. 15 megs is good enough for alot of endeavours so go right ahead and take advantage of his generous offer.

News Brief by MystikShadows


A New Preview of the QuickBasic Game Directory

Lachie Dazarian is at it again. In a post he made in the QBasicNews forums, he announced that he is creating a QBasic Game Directory. You can currently find many titles already added to the database (321 titles at the time of this newsbrief).

The preview website is right here: http://www.kentauri.digitalblackie.com/qgdpreview/

Be sure to take a look at it so you can see where this project is going. In my opinion, this layout will really help to quickly locate our favorite titles quickly and easily. Likewise, if some sort of search facility was added (as I'm sure Lachie probably already has in mind to add), it would make finding our games even easier.

Note that the website is a preview only and not all aspects of it work, however, it looks more than a promising new resource for everyone to enjoy. So, if you want the latest and greatest of the QB Gaming experience, be sure to keep your eye on this "soon to come" excellent resource.

News Brief by MystikShadows


Grand Opening of "QBWiki" by Torahteen

Torahteen, a self-described "fourteen year old on a mission," announced the opening of a brand new QBasic/QuickBasic wiki (user-edited online encyclopedia) at the beginning of October. The site, simply entiteld QBWiki, "is pretty much completly void of any articles," so Torahteen encourages us: "so start writing. If anything, just write a few crappy defenitions. It'll start growing... soon... I hope."

Unfortunately, it appears that this QBWiki didn't really catch on; in its first three days of existence, there were several updates, but they died off. There hasn't been an update since October 5th. Perhaps the Qmunity feels that the current QBasicNews wiki is enough, or that we already have enough online resources for QB programming. Oh well.

News Brief by Pete


Syn9's Hideout Gets Major Revamp

Syn9, the guy behind The Griffon Legend, Vampira and Zero G, did a major revamp to his website this month. Now, Syn9's Hideout has a much cleaner, more intuitive design, and more extensive information about Syn9's other past projects and demos. Most recently, Syn9 has posted new screenshots of the ships from his upcoming 3D racing game Zero G Academy -- and they look absolutely spectacular. If you haven't played through Syn9's phenomenal games yet, you absolutely have to visit this site!

News Brief by Pete


ASCII-World launches the ASCII World Software Development Initiative.

ASCII World has created an initiative to help find and keep Text and ASCII projects, applications, tools, utilities, games and library available as well as a unified means of making software available to the rest of the internet world. the ASCII World S.D.I. (Software Development Initiative) is an effort to accomplish the following things:

  1. Find all types of Text and ASCII programs already created so they that do not dissapear off the face of the internet. Project owners will be contacted as we find them, to see how ASCII World can make them available to it's visitors.
  2. Create Text and ASCII programs in any category and programming languages to attempt to fill in the game of missing useful programs and games available as Text and ASCII programs.
  3. To offer a unified label for program makers (all software categories) as a symbol of the S.D.I. effort.
  4. To create and manage a global catalog of the available text and ASCII programs and games to quickly locate the programs of interest, get information on them, who to contact, and other related information for the visitor's convenience.

Just another way that ASCII-World is showing its dedication to Text and ASCII based software development.

News Brief by MystikShadows

Project News

Poxie Gets an Update

After reading about Poxie, Lachie's latest creation, you'll be happy to learn that Lachie has been busy creating an update for his game. Those of you that played Poxie since QB Express #14 might have noticed an issue about the game taking up 100% of the CPU usage while it was executing. I'm happy to announce that Lachie has fixed this problem now.

Make sure you get the latest version of Poxie, version 1.1, from his website: http://kentauri.digitalblackie.com/

This way you'll be sure you don't suffer the 100% CPU usage blues and can feel the full experience of this interesting and entertaining game. In Lachie's own words it was a small but very important issue that he can now put in the past.

News Brief by MystikShadows


Phat Games Rerelease Kids of Karendow

Blair of the Phat Kids has completed an updated version of their QB classic Kids of Karendow. This first version is only a re-release of the original with remixed music, which will eventually be followed by Karendow Revisited, a FreeBasic adaptation of the original KOK.

If you've never had a chance to play Kids of Karendow, this is the perfect time to give it a spin. This long, challenging and hilarious RPG will keep you enthralled for hours.

It can be downloaded at this link: Karendow.zip

News Brief by Pete


Dkl's GUI Creator

dkl, a user from the FreeBasic.net forum, has created a tool that could very well change the way we create windows applications in Freebasic. He calls his project GC (Gui Creator) and it is plan to support Windows only. GC will use the Windows API to create the windows and dialogs. Check out these two screenshots right here. The aim is for it to be as as close as possible to the Visual Basic form designing tool, and as you can see, it's well underway.


As you can see from these screenshots, GC features a uniquely designed interface that yet seems to be on its way to being very functional. Just click the button to add a form and voila, the form is there ready to be manipulated, with the controls needed by the user. It also features some very nice icons for the toolbar that clearly identify what the buttons do.

I think dkl all the collaboration he can use in this project as it really is very promising and if it does get finished, we will all benifit from his (and our) work. You can follow the development of this project on this thread http://www.freebasic.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1491 on the freebasic forum.

News Brief by MystikShadows


Fun500 GUI

Here's a short article that Brandon Cornell wrote about his upcoming GUI, Fun500:

Intro:

I'm 12 and the Programmer of Fun500 GUI. This is my first Article for online posting. Its about time I posted in this great QBasic magazine. I have been on the online QBasic community for over 6 months now.


The start of Fun500 GUI:

About a year ago I found X-GUI 3 and Jacobpalm.dk But I had no clue how to program gfx. Easter 05 I read a graphics Tutorial and in hours I had made Fun500 GUI 2005.


Fun500 GUI Now:

Fun500 GUI now has moveable, closeable,and minimizable windows(50 at a time),buttons(150 at as time), text boxes(100 at a time), and up to 15 lines of text in every Window. (Data from Version .25/.20)

I plan to soon add a desktop, but cant add a script because I an going to use a UniScript.

I also Hope to make a Word program using the font for Fun500 GUI 1.0 that will be used in more than just my GUI because It sounds like a hard task.


Web Site:

My Web site is: http://fun500.us.tt.

We are hosted by Metronic (Todd Suess)


Brandon Cornell

News Brief by Brandon Cornell


VonGodric Releases New Version of FBIDE

By now I don't need to introduce VonGodric or his awesome project that is FBIDE the el facto of FreeBasic IDEs for Windows. VonGodric just announced the official release of FBIDE version 0.4.3. As he mentionned in his release post on the many forums we all visit, it has been a while since any new version of FBIDE were released, however, if you take a look at the changelog, wow, was it ever worth the wait. Here is a copy of this changelog.

Version 0.4.3
* Added Compilation now takes place through FPP extender ( Eric Cowles )
* Added several help file shortcut's into help menu ( vongodric )
* Added Context help via wiki. ( vongodric )
* Added Status text of compilation progress into statusbar and tittlebar( vongodric )
* Fixed bug with opening illegal tab. ( F9 ) ( vongodric )
* Fixed fbide now tries to detect FBC on it's own -before asking the user ( vongodric )
* Fixed seperators in toolbar ( vongodric )
* Fixed several syntax highlighting errors ( vongodric )
* Fixed FBIde no longer empties it's clipboard apon exit ( vongodric )
* Changed FBIde is now compiled with wxWidgets 2.6.2 ( vongodric )
* Changed New indent mopdule -faster, smarter. ( vongodric )
* Changed Console area is now resizeable using splitters ( vongodric )
* Changed '$ - is now recognised as preprocessor statament ( vongodric )
* Changed Cleaned up keywords, added missing ones ( vongodric )
* Changed New nicer looking about dialog ( vongodric )
* Changed Single mouse click in SFBrowser will go to selected S/F ( vongodric )

As you can see, many issues have been taken care of in this release, some more important than others, but all this contributes to the ongoing success of FBIDE. With this and what is on the workload for future versions of FBIDE, it's sure to make this Integrated Development Environment even more popular.

News Brief by MystikShadows


Adigun Azikiwe Polack AFLIB2 Progress Report

I'm sure today, most of you know of the existed of Adigun's AFLIB2 project. He's been quite busy working hard on his project to bring you all the functionality you'd expect from the fact that AFLIB2 is based on AFLIB1 release for QB over 3 years ago and the RelLib library as well. For those of you that didn't hear about the AFLIB2 project, take a look at this thread started by Adigun himself right here: Adigun's AFLIB2 announcement thread on the FreeBasic.net forum as well as here: His QBasicNews Thread started on the QBasicNews forums to get more details.

This is an ongoing project of Adigun's. So, I decided to create a monthly status report bringing you the most up to date information on the development status of AFLIB2 based on the information I get from Adigun himself. I won't introduce the first AFLIB library nor will I talk about the RelLib library as I do not believe they need any introductions today. However, so far, from what I've been told by Adigun, there is alot of surprises in store for AFLIB2 that will make it well worthy of it's new version number.


Aside the many demos and screenshots that Adigun has been creating and showing on the threads mentionned above among other places, he has been keeping me updated on the status of everything. As you know from those threads, adigun has been working on integrating a Scale2X and Scale4X system to AFLIB2, i'm happy to report that the Scale2X phase of integration is now completed and is working quite well. If you want to know more about exactly what Scale2X and Scale4X are, have a look at the Scale2X project on sourceforge. Adigun mentionned that after Scale4X is done, he will be creating complete working examples of Scale2X and Scale4X to allow us to learn (the fast way) how to effectively use these features.

From what Adigun told me, the overall AFLIB2 project is about 48% completed and is advancing well and fast. He's currently working on finishing the Scale4X implementation and his next steps after that are horizontal and vertical scan lines. No doubt that he knows where he's going with this project and seems to have it all layed out and ready to code. Judging from the first AFLIB project and the RelLib's popularity, I think AFLIB2 is sure to become one of the most widely used library available out there for FreeBasic.

As a last minute bit of news, Adigun has mentionned that he now recently added Scale8X to AFLIB2's arsenal. Which gives even better effects to graphics without the need for antialiasing or other forms of image smoothing and edge hiding techniques. Adigun created a demo of this technique that you can get from his thread on FreeBasic.net Forum AFLIB2 thread and he even created some translucency-based fades in the demo, he's looking for some feedback on FPS rates (Frames Per Second) with and without VSync inabled. If you could run the demo and tell him your FPS numbers on that thread so he can evaluate the performances on various CPU configurations I'm sure he would appreciated it greatly.

News Brief by MystikShadows


Competition News

Roguelike Compo Update - October 15th, 2005

As most of you know from QB Express #14, There has been a Rogue like compo on FreeBasic.tk. Every month I will be bring you an update on how things are going. A progress report of what's done and what's left to be done so you can get an idea of where each team stands in their projects. I went to their forum and simply asked the teams to give me a short status report and have collected the replies right here for you: (There may be more participants, but these are the people that replied to my inquiry).

NOTE: For screenshots of what each project looks like, you can have a look at the QB Express #14: Gallery section to get a glimpse of what their respective projects. Also, you can go to my status report thread FBTK Roguelike Compo thread to see all the replies.

  1. rdc (a one man team) mentions: "[Deep Deadly Dungeons] is about 98% done. I am tweaking the gameplay, doing code cleanup and working on documentation.". From what has been said, rdc is the closest to finishing his game.

  2. Dr_Davenstein said: "Zap is on vacation, so our progress is only about 10%. We would have been alot further by now, but I really wanted to do one in 3D, so we started over from scratch in the middle of the competiion. I've got the basics of the engine done. Right now, I'm working out the menu and battle system. I'll update the demo when you can kill stuff." Thank God there's no deadline if you look at the screenshots (link above) you'll see that deciding to go the 3D way was an awesome idea.

  3. Jocke The Beast: "My project has now become a more of a team-project then anything else. Adrew Collins (the main coder of the engine) has been away for some time and I don't know weither I should wait for him or try myself to continue finishing the roguelike. And to be honest, I've been so impressed by Rick Clark's work that my focus has more been to watch his progress then my own Cool Well, let's see...Anyways, things to do for me & Andrew are: Magic effects, attack effects, balance combat, monster special attacks, save & load function, clean up item-code etc."

  4. marzec: "working on the core engine which is approx. at 60% now. got to reimplement multitexturing and blending in the core as this was just a hack to see how stuff will perform best. what's still waiting to be implemented is a proper renderqueue and a more genric mesh and material class. also pending are the animator and animatorstatus classes that will controll an objects animationstatus. implementation of subclasses of class partitioning, which will establish spacial partitions so collision detection and frustum culling gets more performance. what's also missing are proper 3d shape classes and intersection routines. as this is a simple matter of copying and pasting code from somewhere else it shouldn't take to long. The net library is more or less done, the only thing that is missing here is the bridge between the lowlevel net library classes and the actual game engine. The sfx library is still in design phase, but as it is very similar to the gfx library just a little simpler it shouldn't be that time consuming ( maybe 3-4 days, fmod is rather nice ). Input classes are done of course hehe...Working on uml diagramms to nail down the complete design of the engine beforehand ( well at least uml sketches :p ), finding new things i didn't think of before. the engine is also going to be used in an rts game so i want it to be as generic as possible ( gfx, sfx, net and input that is ). will take some time :p " Looks like marzec has opted for the prepared approach with the UML (Unified Modeling Language) modeling.

And there you have it, 4 teams have replied to my question and I truely appreaciate the time they took in keeping me (and you readers) up to date. See you next month as I bring you more of the latest and greatest of this ongoing Roguelike Compo.

News Brief by MystikShadows


Other News

New FreeBasic IRC Channel

I've just been informed of the existence of an IRC channel that's been created for FreeBasic not too many people there but if we look at the number of people that are using Freebasic right now I think the channel has alot of room for improvement. You can basically talk about anything there, a cool place to hang out. But you can also get immediate help if you have specific questions.

The irc server you need to log into is irc.freenodes.org and the channel is #freebasic. At the time of the writing there was 8 people on the channel so it's not exactly dead...but definitaly has room to grow. I'd like to personally invite you to give this channel a try.

News Brief by MystikShadows


The GamerPlusPlus.com Introduction to FreeBasic

Jason Bales (a.k.a. Delta-G) is hard at work at a new tutorial / "book" on programming in FreeBasic, and it's coming along nicely. Here's the message I got from him...enjoy!

I am writing a short book on FreeBASIC programming. The direct PDF download is at: FBbook.pdf

I also have a plain HTML export (it still needs to be gussied up) at: FBbook.html

I'm not too far into this project, but some of your site visitors may be interested.

-Jason

News Brief by Pete


Nekrophidius and Rhiannon Welcome Baby Rhianna!

On October 29th, Basic Network founders Nekrophidius and Rhiannon gave birth to their first child, named Rhianna Arecelis. She's a beautiful baby girl, weighing 6 pounds and 7 ounces. Congratulations Nek and Rhia! Everyone at QB Express wishes you all the luck in the world, and we know you'll be great parents!

News Brief by Pete

Send your QB/FB news to pberg1@gmail.com!


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!

Cadisman

Once again this month, I left the Gallery for the last minute. I haven't had enough time to research and write a proper preview article. So, I present to you some information and screenshots about a swell QuickBasic RPG called Cadisman which is in the works. All of this is taken directly from the official Cadisman site, without permission from the game's developer Bradley Lanham. (I hope it's allright with you, Brad!) We here at QB Express sure are shameless. Anyway...


Cadisman by Brad Lanham of Indeed Games is very exciting to me, because it hearkens back to the golden era QB programming back in the late 1990's when everyone and their brother was making their own epic QB RPG. Brad is continuing the tradition with Cadisman, written in QB with the Future Library. Although this RPG has many traditional elements, it will allow users to control their fate: "Cadisman is an Role Playing Game where you control your own destiny. Your decisions will affect the friends you gain or lose, and the battles that you must fight. Choose your own style of fighting from archery, magic, or melee."

Cadisman already boasts many very cool features. In the current version, players are able to go fishing for prawns (shrimp), bream (fish), lobsters and sharks, using different varieties of bait. You're also able to build buildings: First, you have to use a hammer and chisel to gather stone, collect logs and saw them into planks, and then earn gold and silver by crafting iron and smithing....then you use a building plan to make a structure such as a shed to store your belongings. You're also able to buy, sell and trade with a trader. Prices are determined realistically through supply and demand; when you sell goods, their market value depreciates, and when you buy goods, market prices increase. They gradually return to their original amount.

These are just a sampling of the awesome features available in Cadisman, which promises to be a very open-ended and creative RPG when it's finished. I can't wait!

Here are some screenshots:










Visit the Cadisman website for more information!



Searching For The Unknown
MADMIX GAME by Enrique Huerta, 2000

Written by Lachie Dazdarian

Introduction

Since MADMIX GAME is a pacman game allow me to say few things about QBasic pacman games first.

Pacman games were relatively popular in the QBasic game design scene but for most game designers pacman games were a part of their "learning" stage so majority of those games are not very interesting. I must mention the popular Hack-Man 2&3 by WisdomDude as two excellent QBasic pacman games and while I appreciate the effort and quality of those games they simply didn't appeal to me much. I should also mention Pac-Classic by Phillip Jay Cohen. While it featured scrolling and excellent retro design it came only with one level map. There is a whole bunch of other QBasic pacman games but none of them comes close to Hack-Man 2 or 3(the ones I've played, mind you). The only other QBasic pacman game that really caught my interest was MADMIX GAME and while it can't be compared with Hack-Man 2 or 3 in many aspects it has few interesting and original features that Hack-Man games don't.


About MADMIX GAME

MADMIX GAME is a very cool Pacman game featuring scrolling and EGA(16 colors) graphics. While you may think that EGA graphics are a very limiting factor for the quality of the game's graphics you will notice from the screenshots that the designer managed himself quite well in 16 colors mode. The animations in the game are quite nice and vibrant and Enrique Huerta displays a very good sense for graphical design. I'm not saying that EGA graphics are the best choice for a Pacman game but this game suffers very little because of that.

What you can also notice from the screenshots is that MADMIX GAME features a very small game screen which is about one third of the entire screen(320*200 screen resolution). I find such choice hard to understand since the game was released in 2000. But I don't know. MADMIX GAME is a pure QBasic game and it's possible that the designer had a slow PC when developing it. Anyway, it's a shame but not a huge flaw.

Like in any other Pacman game your goal in MADMIX GAME is to eat all the balls within a specific stage and avoid the enemies(phantoms). Most stages feature few special "red face balls" which turn you into the angry Pac when you eat them and while being the angry Pac you can eat the phantoms.

MADMIX GAME comes with quite few original features that make it different for the hordes of other pacman games. The most important is the "circular scrolling". I don't know how else to name it. Basically, the stages don't have a visible vertical edge so if you travel in right or left direction as much it's possible you will end up on the same place. Just imagine that the stages are wrapped around a cylinder and you move around it. This is a really cool feature and I have never seen anything similar in another QBasic game. This is executed perfectly and you never know where the real vertical edge of a stage is. Not any kind of position jump or jerking is visible when you move horizontally and pass over the invisible edge. Not that this thing is very difficult to code but Enrique Huerta took the trouble to implement it in a game and with a purpose in the gameplay. My compliments. Another original feature are "pac lane" balls, a set of balls you need to eat but with arrows which force you to follow them. So if you are approaching from the left to a pac lane ball with an left arrow by it you can't eat it. And if you get caught into a string of Pac lane balls you better be sure than an enemy isn't around. Then there are these trap doors which can be passed only from one direction and every time you pass it in flips(toggle system). Trap doors a very nicely animated and only with 3 frames! There is also this bug enemy which replaces the balls you already ate. You can destroy the bug but only as the angry pac. All these features result in a quite different Pacman game experience. The circular scrolling, the directional balls(pac lane) and the other features mentioned before are all very original and add depth in the classic Pacman gameplay. I don't know how much I should praise Enrique Huerta for originality since I can't be sure if he copied the game concept from somewhere else. Still, nothing is said in the documentation.

MADMIX GAME features 15 very challenging stages(I've reached stage 7 or 8 barely after several tries), 3 tilesets and quite good enemy AI. The package also includes the level editor but it doesn't work on my PC(Window XP; mouse cursor won't appear). The game doesn't feature any sound or music. Actually, I've noticed looking in the source code that several SOUND statements were REMed. Probably for a good reason.



I should mention that the game probably has a serious bug. I can't be sure since I used cheating to discover it. Anyway, if I cheat and use stage skipping to reach stage 14 the game interrupts with an error. Huge minus!

Anyway, MADMIX GAME is a very addictive and challenging pacman game, the most entertaining QBasic pacman game I've played. But due the EGA graphics, small game screen, lack of sound and music and that bug it is far from the best QBasic pacman game ever made. Pity, because the game concept and the original features could have been exploited much better.

I will wrap this up now. A bit short article for me but nothing more needs to be said about this game. I know I've said this before for some other QBasic games too but MADMIX GAME is really a perfect game to remake in FreeBASIC. The entire gameplay is here. All you need is to redo the graphics, add some nice sound effects and music using FMOD and add a lot of polish if you want to release something above average. I'll refer to what Pete Berg wrote in the poll from QB Express issue #4 and Deleter in his "Game Apathy: Another Symptom Analyzed". If you most likely are not in the opportunity or on skill/experience level to work on an "epic" project what can help you to gain experience and fill you up with positive energy is a smaller or some medium project. Some project that will take about a month of hard work and if you get side-tracked at least you will be able to see that the completion is near and very reachable. But I have a strange feeling I'll be remaking MADMIX GAME sometime in the 2007. If George W. Bush doesn't destroy the world till then. :P

Final score
5/10

Get MADMIX GAME

To download MADMIX GAME click here: madmix.zip

I realized few weeks ago that I've concluded all the previous editions of the column with "that was it for this issue" or something similar so I won't do that this time. :P

I'm planning to feature Robot Plague in the next issue. It is probably the most weakest game in the gameplay department featured so far in the column but it's enough original and interesting in other aspects for me to write about it.



Game Production

Written by Matt2Jones

Author’s Note: Production as in the way music is produced, not as in the actual game development.

Pete needs more articles, and I don't have the final music one done yet, so I'm going to rant on about easy effects you can put in to games to make them appear extremely professional. Basically I'm going to be talking about the styles and fashions of computer games...

So, First Up -


Logos

When you go to see a film the Logos of the various studios and companies involved are put their (Aside from advertising reasons) as a showcase of the power behind the film your watching, to sort of intimidate you into thinking 'Jesus, these guys are Gods'. The most important part of a Logo is for it to seem all powerful and unstoppable, Universal use the globe that revolves, Dolby have the flying through space effect, etc.

In a Game the same principle applies, but their application is slightly different. In my mind the most impressive way a logo can be displayed is without delay (i.e. No changing screenmodes just before or afterwards), just a straight palette fade in, a two, two and a half second pause, and a fade out again... Waiting for a keypress can be detrimental, as it gives the user some control over how the logo is displayed, and the whole point behind them is to impress upon the user your all powerfulness. I also recommend a relatively slow fade in and out, as it gives the impression of a monumental force, slowly, but inescapably, thundering towards you, and away. Fast fade in/outs suggest it's extremely lightweight as is being fucked around by the force behind it...

Let me explain that a little clearer. Big things with a lot of force driving them move slower then small things moving with the same force, so if you see a big thing moving really fast, you think there's something wrong about it, and it must be lighter then it looks. Imagine rolling a 50kg rock down a hill, it slowly building up speed, decimates everything in its path, and then slowly decelerates, coming to a halt long after the hill has ended. Then imagine a sculpted styrofoam ball made to like a rock. It will reach its maximum speed going down the hill about as soon as you push it, it will bounce down and stop almost instantly at the bottom... Not a great show of an unstoppable force.

As far as the actual logo design goes, if you're fading from black stick with mostly dark colours, and stay away from smooth colour fades in the picture (But any pixel artist can tell you that), it looks unprofessional, and comically compared to it's dramatic introduction.

Sound effects for the Logos are surprisingly unnecessary in games (given their prevalence in cinematic logos), and I'd advise staying the fuck away from them unless it takes NO TIME AT ALL to load and play the sound, any stalls before or after the dramatic showing cheapen the effect, and make it look like your game can't actually handle the resources it's showing itself off with (which is not a good thing). Also try an avoid audible speaker clicks as they are turned on and off, as anything that may clue the user in to how your doing what you're doing helps them understand what's going on in the computer, and people don't fear what they understand (generally speaking)...

The most important thing is the Logo has set the mood and pace of the game that is to follow; anything that comes afterwards that doesn't fit in with the rhythm it provided will bring your towering powerhouse crashing down.


Title Screen:

Obviously a Title screen should be designed to be looked at for a long time. All I can really say about them is the following:

If the title screen is a menu system (i.e. expecting some sort of complex user input) it's perfectly acceptable to have a still bitmap in the background (make sure it's of the same quality, or better, then the logo's that proceeded it however), or even a solid colour, or fading screen, but if it's more of an arcade style title screen (just a 'press start to begin play'), then under no circumstances put up something that simple, or it will start to feel (from the user's point of view) like an un-impressive logo, that they have control over. In an arcade style title screen you NEED some sort of eye-candy, or it falls to pieces.

Run of the mill techniques would be to have parts of the picture fly in from off screen (not as in the picture is cut up, and squares fly in, but each sprite, or word, or letter), multiparalex style scrolling effects (bands of sprites scrolling across the screen at different speeds), or simple flame animation/blinking eyes/smiling mouths/wagging fingers/blowing trees/etc. I'd shy away from massive full-scale animations because the title screen should probably be able to loop indefinitely, and it's much better not to go back through the intro again (shows the user how you’re doing things), so multiparalex scrolling, small areas of 2 frame animation around the screen that can be kept on repeat are best.

As far as music goes, it's probably advisable to introduce the main theme of the soundtrack here (the theme song if you will), so the players begin to recognize it, and it will have significance when it appears in the game again.


The Game

The main message here is that abused 90's buzzword 'multimedia'. The secondary message is speed uber alles.


The NSDP pun:

I've heard it said that the guy who designed Quake said (and I paraphrase) 'any amount of graphical fuck-ups will be gladly overlooked as long as there is really fast action and gameplay.' He's an eloquent bastard, he is... Anyway, it's fucking true, most people complain endlessly about the FF games turn based fight system, because it's slow and boring, where as they all rip each other to pieces to piss a little closer to the almighty Zelda games (despite the fact everything else about them is shit), because they are fast. How this equates to FB/QB is not quite as dramatic... Just don't ever use inkey$ to take keyboard input, use a multikeypress system (like MULTIKEY for example)... It's unbelievable how much it adds to your gameplay (If you actually look at the increase-in-enjoyment factor, you'll find it's less of an addition, and more of an exponential increase)... Frustrating controller response has brought down consoles before, don't think your game will fair any better.

Basically, if you feel your game is lacking, speeding everything up is a industry tested catch-all solution to the problem (even if it makes it unplayable, anything hyper-active automatically gets a cult following, see Excel Saga and Puni Puni Poemi...). There is a very real and imminent reason why Sonic and Mario had a 'speed the main character up' power-up.


The gay-ass industry jargon:

Humans are visually orientated. Even deaf people can get by okay because they can see; it's a lot harder for a blind person to get the same from life using their hearing only. This means use lots of colours, this means have fuck loads of movement (just vibrate the sprites around their locations if they aren't doing anything), and stimulate the player like they’re an ADHD toddler. It's not just having good graphics, but it's manipulating them well. Evangellion, one of the greatest anime ever, got by not with state of the art animation, but beautiful image manipulation. Multiparalex style effects are unbelievably easy to manage, and really look good. Slow panning/zooming over a large picture instead of holding it still on the screen is a stupidly easy-to-implement mood-builder. Flipping between two/three frames repeatedly can often be just as good as running a mini animation, and infinitely better then (or maybe just twice or three times as good as) a still picture that flashes up.

Following on with the ADHD toddler analogy... Has anyone hear ever seen Japanese television advertisements? Model you game on those. They. Are. In. Sane. Every screen action can be easily accompanied by a .5 second wav sound-effect, and this sort of sensory bombardment is proven to hold the attention of anyone playing your game. The sound effects don't have to be good, they just have to be their. Would anyone describe advertising jingles as good pieces of music? No. How many of you would sing the chicken tonight song if I started? ~50%. And that is all I need to have a majority (to the pedantic among you, (50% + 1) = a majority).

None of these suggestions tell you how to make a good game, or code better, then are just suggestions on how to make a game look sleek and 'professional' without having to change your coding style... It's like the difference between a song recorded on a single track, or with 14 drum tracks, 3 vocals, 3 backing vocals and 34 guitar tracks. It doesn't mean the song is good or bad, but it means the radio and MTV will play it.

Author's Note: for the record, the games I deduced this checklist from were Sonic The Hedgehog 1 and Mysterious Song. I don't know why, they were just the images in my head at the time.

Matt2jones
Email: Matt2jones@yahoo.com


Qbinux - Revisited, Part Deux

Written by Seb McClouth

“Do you want to know what Qbinux is? If you want to know, follow the kiwi-bird.”

And here I am writing my fourth article. I have release the tech-release of McClouth Qbinux version 0.2. As I have told in my last article I have rearranged most of the core to its Linux-place.

In the tech-release I have included a basic Qbash, due to some bugs not function completely yet.

The tech-release was delayed due the fact that there were some bugs in the code and because of those I wasn’t able to run Qbash at all. Some digging around in the code made me able to solve the problem.

When I had solved that problem, I starting working on the security routines, which wouldn’t have been possible without the code written by Rattrapmax. And yet again I programmed a new bug. I compiled the whole bunch and when I started the program I had to keep on entering the loginname and password. Eventually after changing this I had the following output:


Which, of course, wasn’t what I wanted. And yet again I had to return to the drawing table. Finally I was able to get the right code. Only to give me a last bug with a *bliep* LOCATE-command. I posted on the forum before I found out it was locate-problem. After talking with Moneo and MysticShadows (not really about the code) I decided to isolate the security routines and run them stand-alone. And voíla, I found out it was all because of a Locate-error.

Then I was able to focus on Qbash. It was a program from scratch mostly. I have to say that there’s also mucho code from Z!re’s Novix. For that reason I kept the Novix core version (Xivon v11.4) and can be found aside the Qbinux core version. Here-and-there in the code you’ll find some remarks saying ‘For future release’. Most of this stuff can’t be put to use until Qbash works just fine.

For that same reason I’m not able yet to build the appropiate installer for Qbinux. To be able to do that I will have to do some more studies on the NVXFS and be able to build it from scratch during setup.

Anywayz, I think it’s looking great. I have a lot of source on Linux which I use to create Qbinux. I have great plans with Qbinux and I hope you like it

I’d also like to tell right now that I’m currently moving. There’s a slight possibility that I won’t be online for 2 to 3 months. I’ll try to work on Qbinux and will try to post sumfin every now and then. If needed or requested I’ll write an article and try to mail it to Pete.

For now I’d like to quote myself: “Until furture notice...”

Seb McClouth

Find out more about Qbinux at these forums.


Review of The Griffon Legend by syn9

Written by Lachie Dazdarian

Yes, yet another review of The Griffon Legend. You must be thinking now something in the line of "Does The World Need Another Review Of The Griffon Legend?". But bare with me. Why it should be odd that some game gets reviewed more than 1 or 2 times? Think about all the movies that have been reviewed over 1000 times. Now when we think about the size of our community 3-4 reviews of one game shouldn't be something strange especially if we are talking about an excellent game as The Griffon Legend is. Anyway, I really want to run this game through the "VPlanet grinder".

For those who don't know(really?) The Griffon Legend is an excellent action RPG of a smaller size with excellent graphics and great music. The best FreeBASIC game released so far(September, 2005).


Graphics

The Griffon Legend's graphics are a strange mixture of very detailed and excellent sprites and tiles and few surprisingly poor and/or poorly composed tiles. I was mostly impressed with the style and the skill displayed by syn9 having in mind that this was his first serious 2D project. What I especially liked were the graphics outside the castles(trees, grass, etc.) and, what you can't see from the screenshots, the animations in sprites. The movement of the main character and other "small" enemy characters is very skillfully and realistically animated, as well as the attack animations. The Griffon Legend also features chain-like animations with the boss enemies which are very cool but this feature alone wouldn't mean much if the graphics that make it, and the rest of it in general, weren't excellent. It's important to mention that The Griffon Legend doesn't feature any death animations. When you kill an enemy it simply disappears. I didn't really miss this feature much except with the boss enemies but when it comes to scoring the graphics I have to take this into consideration. The place where this "flaw" is most obvious is in the moment when you kill the end boss. There is no a single moment between the last blow you inflict on the end boss and the outro. The same thing happens when you die. The program simply kicks you back to main menu. The menu graphics and the design of the game submenu is, however, flawless. The main menu and the screens outside the castles feature a very cool fog effect which shows the benefits of using 32-bit graphics so well. I should say that the number of different tiles in the game is relatively small but works for a game of this size. One thing I really didn't like relates to the foreground layer. On most places where foreground tiles are used if you walk into a foreground tile from the side and slightly below it part of your character's body will end being covered by it while the bottom of his body won't because the tile under that is a part of the same wall or pillar belongs to the background layer. A similar thing happens with the status bars placed below the main character(as well as with the ones below the enemy characters). All this really ruins the illusion which foreground tiles suppose to create.

The game's screen resolution is 320*240 and it's nice to know that there are programmers still interested to work in such resolutions. I'm not alone! Anyway, if the game featured death animations and some "ugly" tiles didn't happen The Griffon Legend would get 5 in this section very easily despite the doubtful foreground layer. The graphics in this game might be better than in some other games which I scored with 4 too but those games featured a more coherent and balanced style. Syn9 shows so much skill and ability that the presence of these flaws puzzles me.

4/5

Sound/Music

This section was missed in the Josiah Tobin's review and that was the main reason for me to do this review. Why? The Griffon Legend features brilliant music. Maybe a bit too strong word but I don't know how else to describe it. Since I own a PC with a sound card for a quite short time I can't say I'm much of an expert in this department. But comparing The Griffon Legend with all the other games featuring digital music I've played so far it's music is right in the top with the music from Star Control 2. Anyway, maybe it's not so smart to compare music from different games. What's important is that the music in The Griffon Legend fits the gameplay like a glove and highly enhances the play experience. Right from the menu music(more of a humming) you'll sense the high quality. During the game 4 music tracks exchange except with the boss battles where a special boss track accompanies it. While they are all excellent I should point out "Spiders In The Willow Trees" and "Dreaming Awake"(intro and the outro music) as true gems. David Turner, the guy behind the music, is obviously talented. Anyone who has him making the music for his or her game is blessed.

The sound effects are very good but I can't say excellent. None of them seems out of place but you kinda feel there should be more of them. Some blood squish, hurt, foot-step, distant humming or breathing sounds would be cool. Just try to play the game without the music and you'll know what I'm talking about. Also, one sound effect is incorrectly used. Every time you change a scene you hear a door opening sound while a door is not between all the locations. A bit silly mistake. Anyway, if you were not able to play the game with the music your are missing the BEST aspect of this game beside gameplay.

5/5

Gameplay

The gameplay is rather straightforward and entirely based on action with some simplified but notable RPG elements. The Griffon Legend doesn't feature scrolling which means the game world is consisted of single-screen rooms. You can avoid most of the enemies in this game but it is imperative that you kill as many of them possible in order to level up and on some screens to receive a key which is necessary to unlock certain doors in the game. Every time you revisit a location the enemies are revived(doesn't apply on bosses, of course). From time to time you will have to beat an boss enemy which always leaves something behind crucial for the progress in the game. It's interesting to point out that some enemies that are a boss in the first part of the game are nothing but regular enemies later in the game.

Placed below your character are three bars representing health, attack and magic. When you attack an enemy(you character attacks by leaping forward and flipping with his blade out) your attack meter completely depletes and then slowly recharges. The strength of you attack depends on the attack meter. The way spells are used it very similar to this. Later in the game when you beat the first boss you will receive a crystal and by using this crystal you can and should find 4 spells: spinning blade, ice whirl, falling rocks and fire. The spells are used by accessing the submenu(press CTRL) and aiming them toward one of the enemies. The game pauses during this procedure. Each spell has it's own "energy" meter and after using a spell it's meter also completely depletes and you can't use that spell until it recharges to full. Also, every time you use a spell the main character's spell meter depletes and if you use another spell before it recharges to full that spell will be less powerful. By killing enemies you gain experience points and when you accumulate enough of them you level up. By leveling up your attack and shield strength increase as well as the speed of attack/magic meter recharging and your maximum hit points. Spread all around the game are flasks which recharge your health and there are two better shields, swords and armors to find. But the best shield, armor and sword is protected by a secret boss which kinda looks silly (bat-cat?) and I was only able to kill it by cheating (it was really difficult). It really doesn't pay off to beat it.

The game features enough different enemies and bosses with different attack features/patterns to make this game very entertaining to play and not boring above all. While the battles require more than mindless sword swinging they are in the same time very simple and not frustrating. The spells add a lot to the gameplay in the sense of strategy and making better results in crowded battles. It is very obvious that this game was heavily tested and it paid off. While in some battles, especially with the bosses, we can spot the flaws in the gameplay it's enough excellent to get a perfect score. Requiring more would be unreasonable. A note: You can use the "rock" spell to destroy some of the obstacles in the game(red spikes). This reminds me. The Griffon Legend could really use a better documentation.

5/5

Story

The story is somewhat original but not very deep. In a nutshell it's about griffons versus dragons and you play the role of a Griffon Knight. I guess it's more original than humans versus evil [insert race name]. The story is well written despite the few mistakes I've noticed but nothing more than that. The story is presented in a form of passing text placed on the orange foggy sky both in the intro and the outro. No cinematics. This game probably doesn't need more but giving The Griffon Legend a higher score in this section wouldn't be fair to game developers who put a lot of time and effort in the story and story development.

3/5

Replay value

My least favorite section in the VPlanet's reviewing system. A very difficult section to score and often not terribly relevant. As with most RPGs it's always interested to give the game one more spin after you finish it applying the experience gathered from before but you will probably be more motivated to re-explore the game world using a save game position where you are near the battle with the end boss. Playing the game all over, with a so weak character, I didn't find very appealing. This game simply didn't do it for me in the sense of "playing it over and over". If the game had some bloodbath/practice mode where you would play for score with a time limit or something similar that would be another thing.

2/5

Challenge

Not a very difficult game but most freeware RPGs aren't. Of course, being an action game too The Griffon Legend requires more than patience which is not the case in great deal of freeware RPGs featuring turn-based battles. There will be quite few screens in the game where you will be victorious only after several tries and leveling up is required to be successful as the game progresses. This game feels more difficult than it really is. The way majority of the boss battles failed to play interesting(especially with the end boss) is another reason for this score.

3/5

Fun factor

The Griffon Legend really excels in being fun and entertaining and despite all the flaws I've mentioned it succeeds in emulating a professional design and leaves you with good memories of it. Yes, it's not the longest game out there but I think this shows in the total score. If you haven't played The Griffon Legend yet SHAME ON YOU!

5/5

Total Score

27/35
Good: Excellent gameplay and graphics. Great music.
Bad: Relatively short game(around 2 hours of play time). Few flaws that could have been easily avoided.
Visit http://syn9.thingie.net to download The Griffon Legend.


Pirates of QB (Starting the QBasic GUI Community)

Written by Rocket Boy

Back when I was in 7th grade (around 1997), I was hanging out in my schools library and randomly looked up "Computer Programming" to see if they had anything available. One book came up, something about programming your own games in something called "BASIC". Awesome! I checked it out and started reading through it, using a program I found on my computer called "Qbasic". The book was from the 80s and used line numbers, LET, and GOTO spaghetti code. I loved it! I needed more! So I went to my local book store and bought "Qbasic for Dummies". I don't know if I really learned very much from that book, except for that I didn't need to use line numbers and maybe a little bit about variables, IF statements and things like that.

Of course eventually I wandered onto the World Wide Web to find out more about this enigmatic thing called Qbasic. I found a site called "The QBasic Gallery", which had an unreal amount of games and other programs all made in Qbasic! I was amazed, and started printing out any program that sounded interesting and typing it in by hand into my computer in my room, which was not connected to the Internet. The games I found were simple, fun, mostly arcade or non-graphical RPG type games. I thought they were awesome. I met other friends at school who were equally nerdy, and began conspiring to take over the world with simple Qbasic programs. I eventually started a site called "Luna Soft", which featured some very simple programs I'd made in Qbasic or Visual Basic. I even eventually called it the "VB Gallery", based off of the QBasic Gallery I liked so much.

At some point down the road as I got more into the Internet, this all evolved into a programming group I started called "the UPA" for me and my friends to geek out about and to find like minded people to share ideas and programs with. Something eventually led several of us to start developing and sharing ideas on our own "QBOS's", and this is where I think the QB GUI community got started. Which is really pretty amazing to think about that we sort of started the whole thing. I'm not saying no one who wasn't involved with us made any GUI's around this time; I can't take credit for GIMI, or Rush for example (although I think they have certain things in common with our early ideas); but I do think that this was definitely the first group where we'd all discuss our different GUI's and work to develop them to show each other. Some of our members included Marc Santa(MCCOS, Endaze, the MrChrome GUI site), Steven Wright(TGO!), Alexander Schrab (SnuggleOS), and myself(CDOS). If you look at the source for Snuggle, it actually gives credit to the UPA in the beginning comments. I think we all started making them at around the same time, although CDOS may have came first, followed shortly after by MCCOS and TGO!, and then later Alexander made Snuggle.

Steven, Marc, and myself were all very competitive trying to make the best GUI. I even made a site called QBOS Rumors, which was a copy of Mac OS Rumors where I'd talk about what was going on with all of our different GUI's (without letting anyone know I was the one behind it). We went on like this with the UPA for a bit longer, even to the point of trying to make a group RPG. I developed CDOS as far I could with my meager programming skills at the time (my friend Eric had actually helped alot with the framework for CDOS, since I didn't really know much about QBasic yet), and then just sort of got bored with programming and stopped. I think Marc continued for a little longer, and TGO! was basically done at that point too.

I checked NeoZones every so often, since Marc(AKA MrChrome) was still doing his GUI review thing on there for a while... although eventually that site sort of died off as well. I think everyone probably considers this a really low point for the QB community as a whole. Then, about 5 years later (2005) I found PetesQBSite had come back... bringing with it the awesome QB Express! There was also a new thing called FreeBasic people were getting excited about. I thought about writing an article for one of the early issues, but didn't... then eventually something drew me back to creating a new GUI. I guess maybe it was that my friend Eric had really done most of the hard coding of CDOS and I wanted to make something all my own and also to redeem myself a bit since I felt CDOS was so pathetically lame. I found JacobPalm.dk and saw the QB GUI community too was having a revival and that in fact there were people who remembered CDOS, and actually liked it! So now I've been working on my new GUI for fun in my spare time and being more active in the QB community. And, I guess I can take a little bit of pride in that we sort of started something, even if it's just a small sub-section of a language most people consider obsolete.

By the way, if you're interested you can check out my new GUI at... http://rocketboy.moved.in

Thanks,
Rocket Boy

*Some people may also find it interesting that Pete and I are almost the same age; got started with the same book from the 80s, and went out/got back in to the QB community at almost the same time.



mennonite's last qbe article (huzzah)

Written by mennonite

freebasic continues to have unlimited potential. it is open source, thank god, and cross platform.

freebasic is one of the greatest languages/dialects ever created, which is why i consider the most important figures in the WORLD of basic today, to be pete berg, (thank you one more time) v1ctor (yes, and everyone that helps him, but he's a fine figure.) relsoft (a god among coders) and our own mac (who i maintain is the greatest forum admin of any forum on the internet.)

i wanted to learn c so i could be a linux guru. perhaps i aimed too high there. i've been "pretty good" with computers for almost as long as the PC has existed, and i've loved qbasic since qb4.5 (before version 1.1.) i am an obsolete, outdated, tech who still LOVES dos. if dos had good usb support, i would dual-boot dos and linux, get rid of 98, and feel like a kid again. i'm not an idiot, i'm not a newbie, and i'm NOT a guru. i'm a User... so i care a lot about UserFriendly (unlike windows which is UserHostile, and linux/fb which is still too UserIndifferent... imo.)

i started working on an interpreter (lame, but MINE.) to replace qbasic. i like qb, but i HATE m$. hey, everyone is nuts about something.

so you can imagine my reaction when i discovered v1ctor had done my work for me... 1000x better. well, maybe you can. when i discovered freebasic, i felt like aliens had beamed me up and taken me to a new planet full of frolicking nude models and trees that grew sub sandwiches.

this was all thanks to shadowwolf, (who has always amused me) "showed me the light" and made me fall in love with fb, and almost immediately after i discovered my favorite place on the internet, the qbasic forum - after more than a decade of loving qbasic.

alas, the honeymoon is over. whether we "stick it out" remains to be seen. as i've been saying on the forum for a couple days, i am so frustrated by all freebasic (for dos- i don't want to use a BASIC that requires windows which is horrid or linux that i can't make work FOR me.) offers vs the EASE of qbasic that i am almost ready to quit coding after 20 years of it. i'm depressed.

and v1ctor, i can't imagine your pain. you're like jesus, (i am not a christian.) simultaneously hailed as the savior of basic (which you are, man, you are) and nailed up for every shortcoming, missed feature, (in the BETA!) and other miscellaneous complaint (including my own) even peripheral to fb.

on the other hand, fb is treated by most as a replacement to qb, and doesn't live up to those standards- not even for me. qb is lighter, (few 100k) friendlier (i've never seen the side-ide as there is no dos ide... hey, notepad is FINE, for me!) and it's not a beta. not being a beta, it remains one of the greatest environments to code basic in. i hope fb blows it away, and everyone uses it instead of qbasic.

i hope it becomes so friendly, versatile, and SUPPORTED (*cough* dos) that there is NO REASON to use qb... that everyone on OUR (qbasic) forum is saying "man, qbasic is okay, but you'll LOVE freebasic if you try it."

we're not there. it has a way to go. dude, some things are EASY in fb and somethings are FUCKING HARD! and even if that day comes, if some weirdo wants to use qbasic anyway? i'm gonna respect the fuck out of that guy! (i adore people thst for whatever unimaginable reason feel the need to use basica. now they have my respect...)

so let's get onto support- let's address the qbasic.com nonsense.

qbasic.com links to our forum. it has brought US traffic for a decade. it has always embraced other langauges (in a limited way, admittedly) and some of the members are so old they used other things PRIOR to learning basic. god, i love them. (i have personally entered "programs" into a minivac. fun!)

but we take in ALL the newbies you deride. now, some of you are really nice people that i have enjoyed talking to you. this isn't about *you*... but i have not been anywhere (except the qbasic forum) where my old-fashioned and newbies-first take wasn't met with hostility. pete's qb forum is sort of middle ground. i love his site, i like his forum. qbasicnews, well, i wouldnt have gone there had i known.

i know, you're all from there. i know the "community" is mostly seamless when it comes to forums and websites. i've personally been to over 500 qbasic websites. i know some of you better than you know i do.

but the "qmunity" as a whole (and the forums, overall) is becoming an anti-qmunity. it is becoming derisively anti-qbasic... while also making the claim that FB IS QB.

i've made the claim too... but that's why i don't understand when it doesn't go both ways. to call yourselves a qbasic community and deride qbasic doesn't make sense. i like 32-bit memory addressing. when i was younger i bitched that memory addressing SHOULD work that way, and figured that i'd always be seen as some kind of nut for not just DEALING with page swapping (horror.)

you don't have to tell me the disadvantages of using qb. i know ALL of them and hate them. but i can't tell you what i don't like about fb, not even in the hope that it will improve (that is the point of a beta version, all abuse of v1ctor aside.)

freebasic.net doesn't embrace qbasic, and there's no reason it should be expected to. now under redesign, everyone wants qbasic.com to bring them TRAFFIC. and ultimately the newbies that come to the qbasic forum for help, and the kid gloves some of you seem to RESENT the request for. we've got them. sometimes they come off, but we've got them.

well, there's a solution. you leave us old farts alone. no, i'd like to see more unity, but not at cost. unity doesn't mean us turning into you, it means both sides accepting each other. i love everything freebasic stands for, short of the derision and lack of ease of use. i understand it may never be AS EASY as qbasic, but it can still improve.

but you don't respect qbasic anymore. and you don't respect people that still use it. and if there are exceptions among you, most of you are silly to call yourselves anything with the word "qbasic" in it.

you are the fb community. i understand. but damnit, that's our traffic. if freebasic is that great, (and it is, and can be) then everyone will come to you from freebasic.com.

it's not like the world hasn't heard of it.

now, if you really want to be a community, and not just a clique, get over yourselves. and stop pretending you ARE QB, when you hate qb even more than i do.

i'm going to my forum now, and i don't intend to bother you again. as wonderful as pete is, and as wonderful as freebasic is, i only wish the lot of you the best.

but like freebasic, (long live freebasic!) you have a long way to go. the qmunity you claim to be is where i'm headed instead. somewhere nothing remotely like here. good luck.

http://www.qbasic.com (for now, this still links... indirectly... to a community.)



Some writing about writing (for the Programmer (and anyone else too))

Written by urger (Peter E. Lenz)

Reading the articles and posts around the internet I see many mistakes made by individuals when they write. I feel that there are two reasons for them; first that people on the internet are typically writing very quickly. When people do that errors creep in. It's inevitable. Secondly I feel that many people are just not aware of some the very nonsensical and idiosyncratic rule and suggested practices of standard modern English. It's my goal to help make people more aware of these rules and enable them to write better English.

Leet, AOLspeak, smiles and the ilk do not belong in serious articles. While they may be fine for posting on a Forum or in IRC, articles are for more serious language. Ask yourself if what you've just wrote in something you would hand into your boss. If not then you should think about rewriting.

Quotes are your enemy. Many tutorials I have read are filled with needless quotes. Lines such as “I thought to myself “Why not!”” are not proper English. If you can rephrase a sentence without the quote, do so. The two exceptions is when you are quoting another source or when using an exact, but not generally known, phrasing. Remember, you, as the author, are never considered to be another source., you can never quote yourself.

Never use inappropriate language in an article. It is considered offensive and detracts from your work and from yourself as a writer. When confronted with an article with such language most editors will discard it immediately rather then have to edit it.

Use varied phrasing. Many articles I've read recently use the same phrasing over and over again. Keep a thesaurus handy.

Avoid adjectives that modify adjectives. “Extremely great” is an example because extremely modifies great. Be aware however that there are some examples that are considered proper, “very good” is the most common of these.

It's better to launch right into a sentence. Starting one with, for example “So,” or “Now,”, breaks up the flow of your work and gives it an indecisive feel. Avoiding them makes your work feel more expert.

Add 's to a word to make it possessive, unless it already ends in S in which you should just add the apostrophe. Note that pronouns, such as “their” or “his”, are never made possessive by using an apostrophe. Years are never given apostrophes, hence 2000s and not 2000's.

When using contractions take care not use too many and, if you use them, where you do. Always make sure the full version of the phrase (they're/they are, aren't/ are not, etc.) that contraction represents fits. If not then that contraction can't be used there.

There is a big difference between “it's” and “its”. “It's” is a contraction of “it is”. “Its” means refers to that which belongs to “it”. “Its'” is an impossible word in English.

Clichés ought be left out of your writing. Phrases such as “any, way, shape, or form”, “like” (It's like really cool), “last but not least”,”for lack of a better term” or any stock sentence fragment detract from your writing. Your reader will interpret these phrases as filler, they will get the impression that you don't know your topic as well as you actually do.

English has many rules. Those I have listed are only a subset of these. Just keep even a few of these rules in mind when you write and it will improve it significantly. I also suggest a number of different resources for your perusal:

A print dictionary, while online dictionaries are useful for quick look ups I have found my 1982 Funk and Wagnall's to be more comprehensive. In addition online dictionaries seem to be plagued with incorrect definitions, even online versions of print dictionaries. I can't explain why this is, it just is.

The same goes for a thesaurus. While good writers use a dictionary often, great writers use a thesaurus often. Remember that using the same words and phrases repeatedly bores readers.

The exception to both those suggestions is the Oxford English Dictionary, the Holy Grail of English. If you can gain access to the OED website through your place of employment or school, do so. It is the single greatest source of information about English in existence. Full stop.

I also very much so suggest you visit the Lynch Guide to Grammar and Style at andromeda.rutgers.edu . This site is a great resource for common (and not so common) English problems with a practical, writer oriented view, as opposed to the more theoretical one taken by English teachers.

It's my hope that my readers learn a bit from this work and apply even a bit to their everyday writings. Humans are social animals and social animals have to communicate. It is a integral part of who me are. If we all could communicate with more of a mind toward our language perhaps much of the angst and misspeaking that occurs everyday could be avoided.

A guy can dream, can't he?

Urger is the self-appointed "Proofreader General" for QB Express.


Monthly Awards

Written by Pete

Every month, QB Express hands out two awards to recognize QB or FB coders and websites that have done exceptional work in the last month. They are not awarded for work done in the past, only for work that has been released since the last issue of the magazine. We will bring you these awards on a monthly basis to help give credit where credit is due.

Site of the Month

Syn9's Hideout
http://syn9.thingie.net/

Webmaster: Syn9


Just a few months ago, in QB Express #12, Syn9 was honored with the Programmer of the Month award. Now, only three issues later, he is receiving QB Express's other distinction: the Site of the Month award. And it's for good reason -- his programming projects page, Syn9's Hideout is top-notch.

This month, Syn9 completely revamped his site, completely redesigning tha page and making it much more intuitive to navigate. More significantly, he added many of his past releases and demos for visitors to download, including his hit QB racer Zero G and many amazing FreeBasic / QuickBasic demos that we have continually featured in QB Express. Of course, Syn9's flagship game, The Griffon Legend, is there too. This month, QB Express readers voted The Griffon Legend the best FreeBasic game to date, and I would have to agree with their decision.

Also over the past month, Syn9 has continued work on his upcoming FreeBasic sequel to Zero G, called Zero G Academy. Take a look at the beautiful ship models that he posted on October 30th. You might have to wipe the drool off your keyboard, because they're really something to behold. I can't wait for the next update on ZG Academy, and when it comes, I know where to find it: http://syn9.thingie.net/!


Programmer of the Month

Rick Clark
(a.k.a. rdc)
http://www.fbtk.net/

Since June when FreeBasic.tk's Roguelike Competition began, Rick Clark has been hard at work on a little gem by the name of Deep Deadly Dungeons. After five months of diligent work, DDD is nearly complete -- and it is AWESOME. The game is extremely polished, and has copious amounts of that type of oldschool gameplay that makes roguelike geeks swoon. Deep Deadly Dungeons supports absolutely gigantic dungeons, has dozens of items to collect, scores of evil baddies to destroy, and fun, addictive gameplay. Additionally, it has very nice graphics, along with great sound effects and an atmospheric soundtrack. After playing this game for an extended period of time, I was incredibly impressed. No other roguelike demo released so far in this competition has impressed me more, and Rick Clark should really be proud of his creation. For his dedication and game programming skill, I present rdc with the QB Express Programmer of the Month award!


Thanks to Jocke The Beast for this screenshot.

Have a suggestion for Programmer / Site of the Month? Email me!


Comics

By Rattrapmax6 and Matt2Jones

Rattrapmax6 is back this month with another QBasic Horse Humor comic, and Matt2Jones serves us up with a fresh edition of Bobby The QBasic Maniac.




QBasic Horse Humor




BBY Comic




Graphical User Interfaces - A Complete Study
Part 1 - GUI Design

Written by Stéphane Richard (Mystikshadows)

INTRODUCTION:

When I wrote Graphical User Interface - Design Concepts back in issue #13 of QB Express, I was wondering if and how I could continue this series, or what more I could write about in