thanks, BlinkOK, and very good questions.
Me, being a DBP programmer myself and have created some pretty good games with it such as Fatuus (http://forum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=36739&b=8), I have found that for any 2D game - PlayBASIC is by far the better language to use.
DB uses 3d methods of creating 2d sprites which is very uneffective if you want pixel-perfect stuff. I, being a pixel artist, of course want to make sure my game looks the exact level of quality that i originally designed it to be.
One thing that i had to master with other programming languages was the 2d tile engines. I came up with algorithms to only render tiles that were present on screen and completely ignoring tiles outside. I came up with scrolling methods and pseudo cameras (which we all know you can have camera's in 2d - so i made my own) that would make it appear as if the camera was following a character around on screen while in reality - the bg was the thing that was moving. I also had to come up with editor engines as well as game engines in order to get a decent game going
...... well, in PB, all of this has been made a whole lot simpler. PB uses a true 2d engine that is compatible with alot of really old computers as well - meaning GFX quality is still there. PB also has many tile commands built into the language. It has map commands that will automatically crop tiles out of the screen boundries. another thing that truely helped the making of this game was the use of the camera commands. PB has pre-programmed pseudo cameras for you which is very simple to use and acts alot like the 3d cameras in DB. As far as dealing with editors, PB has many commands to make the job very simple and it automatically organizes the tile data for you. PB even has a simulated z depth. it will automatically draw sprites in order of their z-depth that you asssign to it and it doesn't matter which sprite you render first cuz pb will put it in it's right place. Basically - PB was perfect (especially for a 72 hour compo) - for the creation of a tile based game such as this. It also has many other advantages dispite the tile engine, but I wont get into that because it doesn't directly relate to this particular game.
dispite actual programming advantages - the IDE was extremely smooth, professional and easy to look at. As simple as it sounds, that is truely an important thing to me. I have never been fond of the DBP and especially the DBO IDE. DBP is almost to a point of being good, but its still a little tacky with the grey code screen in all. You can customize the PB editor to color code the commands, numbers, text, etc exactly how you want. One last and final thing that i liked about PB over DB is the one-word commands. Its so tacky and confusing to have commands seperated by spaces. PB does not do this. anyway - overall - if DB worked and looked like PB, it'd be much more to my liking.
one last note: PB is soon to have a 3d engine. It looks pretty promising. Once it has that - i would truely prefer PB over DB any day.
Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land amongst the stars.
