FreeBASIC Community produced game

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Lachie Dazdarian
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Re: FreeBASIC Community produced game

Post by Lachie Dazdarian »

TL:DR, where are we with this now? Anyone has a recap?
badidea
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Re: FreeBASIC Community produced game

Post by badidea »

Paul Doe was building a OOP framework that probably no-one understands :-)
CoderJeff is working hard on the compiler instead, I think.
BasicCoder2 and I are wasting time with demo's.
That's about it?
paul doe
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Re: FreeBASIC Community produced game

Post by paul doe »

badidea wrote:That's about it?
In a nutshell, yes XD
coderJeff
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Re: FreeBASIC Community produced game

Post by coderJeff »

badidea wrote:CoderJeff is working hard on the compiler instead, I think.
haha, yeah, can't be too sure on that one. :)

Mostly yes. I am usually thinking about how to improve the compiler, so the fun things seem to take a lower priority. I started making a repo for the Nanoship program but I haven't pushed it to github yet. It's not much different than the source I already posted (and is still available).

What I am finding is that some of the bugs that have been sitting on sf.net (for years) are actually pretty tough to fix, even with an understanding of the compiler internals. So sometimes takes a few weeks to make any progress. Also, real-life non-freebasic-life sometimes gets busy, and less time to play with programming.
mambazo
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Re: FreeBASIC Community produced game

Post by mambazo »

Did this fizzle out?
badidea
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Re: FreeBASIC Community produced game

Post by badidea »

mambazo wrote:Did this fizzle out?
It was fizzling out and then Lachie diverted all attention to his game competition thread :-)
coderJeff
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Re: FreeBASIC Community produced game

Post by coderJeff »

I was thinking the same thing. And really that's fantastic. It was great to see Lachie organizing the competition, and all the enthusiasm for it, all the new stuff getting made.

I have still have interest for this thing, some kind of community produced effort, maybe not in the leadership role. I think Paul Doe and I tried to indiscreetly hand that role to each other, but no takers so far. =)
Lachie Dazdarian
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Re: FreeBASIC Community produced game

Post by Lachie Dazdarian »

I'm usually sceptical about this sort of voluntaristic group work, but that's hardly a controversial stance.

It would definitely require a strong head designer, who could rally people up around his idea, especial one or two people good with pixel art. The rest of the details could be sorted out in some sort of democratic, voting form.
mambazo
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Re: FreeBASIC Community produced game

Post by mambazo »

If it went the way of a NanoHost revival, there are some ideas I've had in mind for years.
  • Lua script AI files.
    Have the AI script specify urls for the sprites (and sounds?).
    Write and save your AI scripts in-game.
    Save AI to 'cloud'.
    Load any AI from the cloud. Script may or may not be made private (for competitiveness!!)
    Use OpenGL to allow bitmap sprites.
    Audio.
Although I don't really see the creation of the host as the community project part of this. The fun part of the old NanoHost was the competition between AIs, and the constant drive to improve them :)
Lachie Dazdarian
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Re: FreeBASIC Community produced game

Post by Lachie Dazdarian »

mambazo wrote:If it went the way of a NanoHost revival, there are some ideas I've had in mind for years.
  • Lua script AI files.
    Have the AI script specify urls for the sprites (and sounds?).
    Write and save your AI scripts in-game.
    Save AI to 'cloud'.
    Load any AI from the cloud. Script may or may not be made private (for competitiveness!!)
    Use OpenGL to allow bitmap sprites.
    Audio.
Although I don't really see the creation of the host as the community project part of this. The fun part of the old NanoHost was the competition between AIs, and the constant drive to improve them :)
I forgot about that. That was a cool idea.
Tourist Trap
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Re: FreeBASIC Community produced game

Post by Tourist Trap »

coderJeff wrote:I was thinking the same thing. And really that's fantastic. It was great to see Lachie organizing the competition, and all the enthusiasm for it, all the new stuff getting made.

I have still have interest for this thing, some kind of community produced effort, maybe not in the leadership role. I think Paul Doe and I tried to indiscreetly hand that role to each other, but no takers so far. =)
Hello,

a couple of lead designers is certainly useful. From what I learnt from my attempt to submit a game for the 2 last Lachie's contests, we need also a solid skeleton of code, modular enough to make it prone to distributed effort.

For instance in my last code, I successfully reused many pieces of code (dahfi imagevar stuff, dodi's font, and many others) thanks to includes and also simple namespaces. Then I used global variables with macros rather than functions in order to let the game pass informations without any effort to indentify communication variables and their formats.

My main body is simply a select case between the many game phases, each of them (end sequence for instance) being just put into macros for readability as well as to use global variables as said above.

I don't know if I'm right, but for a game, where data has no need for pedantic rigor, it made all quite simpler. So much that despite my failure regarding the delay, I was confident that I could go very far with less time and effort than usual.

Just my 2cents of course. I hope this topic here will concretize eventually.


Just for reminding, I used this scheme for my embryonic game.

Code: Select all

#include goodies
namespaces goodies
....
end namespaces

dim gamevariables

#macro gamesequence1
#macro ...

"initialize stuff"
do
   "get the general user input"
   
   select case gamestate
     case start
     case play
     case score
        play score macro
        ....
     case end
   end select

   
loop
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