VBGamer

Ambition is never a bad thing (as long as you know, which I don't doubt you do, that it will take a lot of hard work). In my opinion, it would be no problem to make a great FPS using VB and DirectX. You might not be able to exactly match the speed of the fastest 3d engines, but you could come very close. Visual Basic IS slower on some things, but as fast as C++ on other things. When coding 3D, you typically don't loop through arrays with thousands of elements, but rather sens a load of polys to the hardware. This is equally fast in both C++ and VB (well, maybe C++ is a little bit faster, but we're talking cycles, not milliseconds). "The trick is to determine WHICH polygons to throw at the hardwrae rende" to loosely quote John Carmack. By using the appropriate alogorithms (BSP trees, octrees etc) you can eliminate the differences between C++ and VB, so they are no longer noticable. I have checked out some 3d engines for vb (including Morfit and Truevision) but I have still not seen any that I think is fast and flexible enough to actually make a game with (except for the Enigma engine, which seems to Kick Ass on the preview movies). If you want a good 3D engine, you'll have to write one yourself or buy one, and the commercial ones aren't cheap. As for graphics, it's of course possible to get it as good in VB as it is in C++ games, but if you are to make a 3D game, you'll need someone who's good at LOW-POLY 3d modelling. As an example, the halflife characters are around 300-400 polygons each, and it's really hard to make good 3d models with that few surfaces. There ARE tools that can reduce high-poly objects to lower poly count, but they can't work miracles. They're basically just for removing the last 100 polys or so. I don't mean to put you off, it's not impossible to make a great FPS in VB, but I just thought I'd point out the difficult stuff right away, so you know what you're up against. Good luck /Corre, MiCo Games http://www.micogames.com