My final BASIC game, Hello C++/Allegro.

My final BASIC game, Hello C++/Allegro.

Chris Adams

Member #7,359

June 2006

I've been making games a long time, started with QuickBASIC some 9 years ago, learned C++ a few years later (although still prefered BASIC for games), and then started making my games in FreeBASIC 3 years ago. As much as I like FreeBASIC for game development, it's time to change. The community is getting smaller, and my sights are getting bigger.

Anyway, Here is my (most likely) final game in FreeBASIC, called "AntiMan"
You can check it out here: http://antiman.pbasichasnoballs.com

I've started a new game, this time with Dev C++ & Allegro, expect something soon.

Sirocco

Member #88

April 2000

Welcome to the club!

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Graphic file formats used to fascinate me, but now I find them rather satanic.

Tomasz Grajewski

Member #4,284

February 2004

http://antiman.pbasichasnoballs.com/ said:

System Requirements:
2.0 Gigahertz Processor
256 MegaBytes RAM
30 MegaBytes Free Hard Drive Space
Sound Card
Video Card capable of 320 by 240, with 32bit Colour
Windows XP

Why so high requirements for the 320x240 screen mode? Not played the game yet, but I'm just curious. Anyway it probably won't run on my ancient PC

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Chris Adams

Member #7,359

June 2006

For the sake of not bad talking FreeBASIC too much... I'd say it's about 70/30, mine/fb's

- It should be playable on a 1ghz with the No Sound version.
- I used a mix of FB's gfx library, and my own graphics functions. Both are optimized, but maybe not as much as they should be, there's a lot pixel blending, and nothing is hardware optimized.
- The collision detection slows things down, as for the sake of getting the game done quickly, I opted out of math based collision detection, and used pixel collision detection, which unfortunatley not only slows things down, but causes problems with the actual collision detection. The upside is that all I had to do to create an object was draw a shape (any shape) in mspaint.
- Finally, why this matters, Some of the latter levels are unbeatable, and some of the earlier levels are harder if the framerate goes dramatically below the max. Because the ship moves in frame time, and the dynamic tiles move in real time. (Which was a bad idea)

Anyway, I'm making a bigger effort to optimize this time, although I doubt it will be an issue (although maybe I shouldn't doubt too much..)