Sorry your browser is not supported!

Never been to these forums before, but I think I'll be here for a while, so I figured I may as well say hi.

My name's Dean, I go by the name Dean, Dark Dean (In FPS') Shiggy (In RPGs) or Someone (Whevever I'm scripting, or a staff member of a online game or website or something)

Anyways, I Used to script for a friend and mine's Ultima Online server, and I also did RPG Maker 2000 at one stage, and scripting and graphic design for Mystera Legends and it's website. I already know HTML, Javascript, and the basics of PHP and C++.

My software Development teacher suggested I get into Dark Basic and got me into it at school, so here I am!

As far as DB Goes, I'm Using DB Classic, I've gone through the Fast Track learning, Programming Principals, and I'm doing the early tuts, so yeah, I figure soon enough I'll need you guys' help.

I probebly sound like an ultra-newbie mentioning this, but the first thing I found was that whilst previewing code, the screen flashed epiliptically (dunno if thats a word, but u get the idea) Anyways, I found putting CLS as my first line figured this, but how come I have this problem? and will it interfere with other peoples games or programs on my computer when I run them? (I have a NVIDIA Geforce FX 5200 - 128 meg DDR Vid Card)

Also, my Software Dev teacher mentioned one of his previous students used a program called "Simply 3D 2" To create 3D Models to import, he hooked my up with a copy, but besides the fact that the program confuses the hell out of me, and I can't find any tuts for it, I can't seam to import the models I slap together anyway (keeping in mind I'm not even up to 2D game creation yet), it'll only export as some file extentions, none of which are ".x".

So yeah, Thanks in Advance for any advice, and it's great to be here. I'm off to take a look through some of the other topics here.

I get that with my fx5200 ultra setup and classic too, but I stopped it by capping the frame rate (ie sync rate 60), I will try the cls trick, never occured to me since you never used to need to do that, it shouldn`t matter to other users (as long as they have 3d acceleration anyway) since once you have the code working correctly on your setup then it should work correctly on all setups that use directx.

just wondered, do you have dx 9.0b?, it could be that the legacy 8.1 driver that db will be using in 9.0b could be the problem, pity I can`t be bothered to uninstall dx9.0b and try 8.1 to see what happens.

you will find that most of the users here are helpful, the first thing you will also find if you have any prior Basic experience is that DB is somewhat "quirky", things don`t always do what you would expect and some functions are missing or lacking, but then it is aimed at the games programmer more than application writing (you can use VB.net for that after all).

I suggest you start out with a couple of simple text games, and then a simple 3D game (where you have to find a path through a random maze for example) and add features a step at a time, most people start off thinking they can write a clone of Quake arena or RTCW by the weekend, seriously, you need to devote a lot of time to graphics, music and sfx, I just write the code with what media I have to hand inserted and then replace it when I have something I think looks worthwhile, you can spend years developing decent media that would be better spent on writing the code, plus the final game may well lose a lot of the media you developed and then dropped for coding/design reasons.

I hope you enjoy codeing as much as many of us here do, it may be seen as "geeky" by some people, but then there are a lot of rich geeks out there, and wealth makes a you prime target as a potential mate to all those lovely gals out there , cheers.

Mentor.

yep, 9.0b.

How do I cap the fps? I dont' think I've got to there yet in the tuts. I never really got into DB. when I started messing around with it first I was like, 12 years old, so It diddn't hold my attention too long.I made a kind of text game while going through the lessons, nothing noteworthy though, just a simple script using all the commands listed in that tut. Graphics I'm looking forward to implementing, I'm alright at photoshop, I've got a friend who's a wiz at midis and music in general, tho I could slap those together myself. I've always been kind of ok at all the stuff you'd need to make a game, And I'm kind of excited to be finally chucking it all together. **Me reads tut on how to make a dot move scross the screen** I'm well on my way to success, my friend. Thank you.

the code is

sync on: sync rate 60

that sets the system to 60fps max, also you will not see any change to the screen until you do

sync

at the bottom of the main loop, so you can move things about to look for potential collisions etc, and then when you have everything sorted and where you want it, do "sync" and you get a snapshot of where everything is at that moment copied to the screen , this allows you to do things like move the enemy bots ahead to check for potential collision and then start them turning before they bump into the wall for example, the "snapshot" happens realy fast and will not slow down your games one jot, and it is always far better to manage the screen refresh yourself rather than allow DB to do it (it doesn`t do a very good job and slows down the code a lot), cheers.

Mentor