Is it much faster to program in Visual bB than it was before?

[Fort Apocalypse]

Just curious for those that did bB development before in Crimson Editor and who now used/tried Visual bB- has it significantly decreased the amount of time to get what you want done?

 

Have there been any notable advances in bB over the past year? Just curious since I've been out of it for a while. (Sorry that I got so much help from Michael and everyone, and left so much undone, btw.)

Edited January 18, 2009 by Fort Apocalypse

[+Random Terrain]

I tried a few editors. The first IDE was pretty good, but it quickly got out of date and was abandoned. The rest were OK, but the latest version of Visual batari Basic is better than all of them. VbB has just about everything you could ever need. With VbB, I no longer have to worry that I'll never get done because I don't have the various bB specific tools I need to help me finish the game. VbB has all of those tools and more.

 

The thing I get stuck on is my lack of programming skills and lack of imagination. If somebody shows me their unfinished game, I can come up with all kinds of possible ideas, but when it's something I'm working on, the idea well is dry. I cannot look at my own stuff as if somebody else made it. So I procrastinate and think about giving up. Do I really owe it to my teenage self to make some Atari 2600 games now that it's possible thanks to bB and VbB? My inner teen screams: "Make some damn games already! It's not that F-ing hard! You walk away from bB, get rusty and have to learn it all over again, so of course it's going to seem harder than it really is. If you would work on your games at least a few times a week, you wouldn't get rusty, dumbass."

 

Maybe I should listen to my inner teen and do what I wanted to do since 1982. And I should remember to read the quotes on my own web site:

 

http://www.randomterrain.com/game-design-p...nd-editing.html

 

You can get all the advice you want and read all the books you want, but what you've got to do is stand at the computer like I did from day one and say, "What can this stupid little thing do?" You've got to try little things out and make a million mistakes. But the great part about a home computer is you can do whatever you want and you aren't going to blow anything up.

~Gary Kitchen from an AGH Library article

 

 

The best way to move game design forward is simply to develop, design, and construct a game. And make sure you finish it. No matter how bad, how simple, how slow your finished product is, you will learn an immense amount simply by building a game on your own.

 

Read, experiment, design, develop, play, and most important of all, have fun. In the end, having fun is what games are all about.

~Ben Sawyer (adapted)

[Impaler_26]

IMO programming with Visual bB is much faster and it also makes things a lot easier, especially the built in editors for sprites, playfields and score-graphics.

 

You should give it a try (and make more games for us )!

[MausGames]

It hasn't made things go any faster for me. The built in graphic editors still don't have enough features for me to use them to design from scratch. My only real gripe about it is that Close Project is right above Save in the menu, and thats just a slight annoyance. It's extremely easy to use and has some great features, but I can't think of anything that is faster or easier to program because of it, for me.

 

As far as notable advances in bB, it's pretty much the same as it was, but there are a few big ones announced as in the works from batari.

 

@RT: BASIC is sort of the bicycle of programming languages. It all came back to me after almost 20 years when I first found bB, so once you become fluent in the language it'll probably stick, even if you take some extended breaks from it.

Edited January 19, 2009 by MausGames

[+Random Terrain]

My only real gripe about it is that Close Project is right above Save in the menu, and thats just a slight annoyance.

I hardly ever use that menu, so I never had that problem. Maybe jwierer can move it. I use Ctrl + S to save and if I want to use Save As, I right click and select Save As at the bottom of that right click menu.

 

 

 

@RT: BASIC is sort of the bicycle of programming languages. It all came back to me after almost 20 years when I first found bB, so once you become fluent in the language it'll probably stick, even if you take some extended breaks from it.

I have found that no matter how much I learn about something, if I leave it for a couple of weeks, I'll forget most of it. I'll have faint memories left over, but it's mostly like starting over again when I go back to it. If I want something to stay in my head, I need to do it at least a few times a week. Not a good condition to have when you're lazy and unmotivated.

[+cvga]

I have some code that I was writing using Crimson Editor. Can I move it to Visual Bb and just keep going?

[Impaler_26]

I have some code that I was writing using Crimson Editor. Can I move it to Visual Bb and just keep going?

Sure, just load your .bas file into Visual bB.

[jwierer]

It hasn't made things go any faster for me. The built in graphic editors still don't have enough features for me to use them to design from scratch.

How would you change the playfield sprite editor?

My only real gripe about it is that Close Project is right above Save in the menu, and thats just a slight annoyance.

That's easily moved.

 

-Jeff

[Fort Apocalypse]

Hey, Jeff!

 

One thing that would help in Visual bB would be to be able to change the font to be a fixed width font (or at least by default). It is nice to be able to see the playfield that way, even though there is the GUI editor.

 

TIA!

[jwierer]

Hey, Jeff!

 

One thing that would help in Visual bB would be to be able to change the font to be a fixed width font (or at least by default). It is nice to be able to see the playfield that way, even though there is the GUI editor.

 

TIA!

I'll check and see what font it uses when you do a fresh install. It easily set in the settings tab though. I use Courier New and playfield and sprites look fine with it.

 

-Jeff

[yuppicide]

I think bB has made much more possible for me than Crimson Editor did, but more so it's the help from everyone here.

 

My problem is sometimes people will help me and it'll take awhile for me to grasp just how their implementation works and I don't always get it.

 

I have very good intentions to finish my "Flesh Gordon" adult game or whatever it'll end up being called, but I couldn't figure out how to implement what I needed. I need the walls of the uterus to drip blood and I've yet to figure it out. It only drips blood on some levels.

[MausGames]

It hasn't made things go any faster for me. The built in graphic editors still don't have enough features for me to use them to design from scratch.

How would you change the playfield sprite editor?

My only real gripe about it is that Close Project is right above Save in the menu, and thats just a slight annoyance.

That's easily moved.

 

-Jeff

 

There are a few things missing from the playfield editor that keep me coming back to Animation Shop, but I can't think of them off the top of my head. I'll post next time I'm doing playfields.

 

There is also this auto-complete thing that really screws with me. If it's at the end of a line, and you ignore it and go ahead and type things out, you have to hit enter twice to get rid of it and move to the next line, that's annoying. It also automatically capitalizes the temp variables, and automatically uncaps the X's in a playfield definition, both extremely frustrating and time consuming!

Edited February 1, 2009 by MausGames

[jwierer]

It hasn't made things go any faster for me. The built in graphic editors still don't have enough features for me to use them to design from scratch.

How would you change the playfield sprite editor?

My only real gripe about it is that Close Project is right above Save in the menu, and thats just a slight annoyance.

That's easily moved.

 

-Jeff

 

There are a few things missing from the playfield editor that keep me coming back to Animation Shop, but I can't think of them off the top of my head. I'll post next time I'm doing playfields.

 

There is also this auto-complete thing that really screws with me. If it's at the end of a line, and you ignore it and go ahead and type things out, you have to hit enter twice to get rid of it and move to the next line, that's annoying.

Well you could hit ESC. If you've ever used Visual Studio it works the same way. Tab accepts the current term in intellisense. Of course you could also just disable that feature in your settings tab if you don't like it.

It also automatically capitalizes the temp variables

Is that a bad thing? I think could just create a custom dictionary with the temp variables in lowercase to get the same effect.

and automatically uncaps the X's in a playfield definition, both extremely frustrating and time consuming!

Now that is annoying, especially since it also indents it, but I guess most people don't notice that because they copy and paste from the playfield editor. I think if you added "X" to a custom dictionary it would give the same effect, but I could probably check for a more elegant fix.

 

-Jeff

[MausGames]

I didn't know I could disable that in settings, definitely good to know. As far as the temps, yes it is a very very bad thing, programs won't compile if one of them is capped, and sometimes i have to dig through pages of code to figure out which ones have spontaneously capitalized themselves for the 20th time.

Edited February 1, 2009 by MausGames

[jwierer]

I didn't know I could disable that in settings, definitely good to know. As far as the temps, yes it is a very very bad thing, programs won't compile if one of them is capped, and sometimes i have to dig through pages of code to figure out which ones have spontaneously capitalized themselves for the 20th time.

Yeah that is not good. I don't know why I have those capped. That's easily corrected. A quick glance through some code though shows that at times TEMP1-6 will compile and another times it fails?

 

-Jeff