VBGamer

1. Has anyone here been attracted to VB from the start because of it's simplicity? Or are there any people like me (so I know I'm not the only one) who look at C code and get a head-ache trying to peice together what's going on? :P Personally, I think VB is a heck of alot more fun! Especially when you're a newbie and you are just dragging the objects onto the form and basically screwing around :P Actually, I used to be a QBasic haX<>R ;) before switching to VB, I never actually tried C/C++ before. Well once I halfway downloaded DJGPP... 2.With all the new OO features to be incorporated into VB7, is this going to make the language any harder? or slower? (I HOPE NOT) Its not going to make VB harder since you do not have to use objects if you don't want to. Well you kinda do, as controls are objects but you don't have to create your own objects if you don't want to. With that, using Object Oriented Programming is really a good idea because it makes your code more structured, flexible, and reusable. It isnt going to make VB slower. 3.Can someone give me an example of where a C++ DLL would become useful in a VB game or something like that? I don't even fully understand what a DLL file is :P A DLL file is compiled and contains various functions and subroutines. If it helps you, think about it as basically a module. A C++ or Assembly DLL becomes useful for time critical things. For example, alpha-blending, which is drawing an image semi-transparent, so you can see the background through it. In VB and DirectDraw, this is really slow since it has to be done pixel-by-pixel and VB is pretty bad at pixel operations. Here you would use an ASM DLL to quickly do this, since in Assembly you just mess around with the computers registers which makes everything really fast. 4.Is DirectX easier to use with VB? I'd assume so since they are both MS products, but how is OGL used in VB? how did they accomplish that? :P I think DirectX is slightly easier to use in VB, since Microsoft actually cut out some functions from the VB version that are present in the C++ one, but they are about equal in difficulty actually. OpenGL in VB isn't "officially" supported, what happened is that Patrice Scribe (www.chez.com/scribe) wrote a type-library that enables OpenGL to be used with VB. You seem pretty concerned with VB's speed. If you want to check out some finished VB games available, there's a Big Huge Games List over at Voodoo VB (http://voodoovb.cjb.net) Peter DDCK:Myth of Creation A Mythical RTS www.talosstudios.com