I want a recommendation for a guide for openGL in Visual Basic. Thank you, Sela. P.S. I know a little bit of openGL in VC++.

ihhh vb sux PPP

quote:Original post by BoggyB
Name an example, and I will prove you wrong.
...
One word of warning: you *might* have problems with the wglCreateFontOutlines() function. It crashed VB on my PC, but I think it's just my seriously mangled Win2k install.

how about wglCreateFontOutlines( ) BoogyB
im not interested in what i can do and what i can not do. i just hate this basic syntax.
the only cool thing is vba (because in school i used it to code tic tac toe because excel was too boring and since i had no compiler i had to use it ;D)


[edited by - cANaBiTz on November 7, 2002 5:12:38 PM]

I recommend reading through my VB port(s)... I can''t remember which lessons I ported now, it was so long ago, but I remember that they were superior to the other VB ports

Also try www.planet-source-code.com/vb/ and search for OpenGL TGA or something along those lines and you should come up with an example program I wrote on loading BMP/TGA/RAW files from VB using pure VB code (No 3rd party libs). My ports created Win32 windows using API function calls. As I''m sure you can imagine, this makes the code easier to read along with NeHe''s tutorials. I once wrote an MD2 model viewer in VB in collaboration with this German guy, though I never submitted it..

Also about VB''s limitations... I might add that I was quite big on the amateur VB game development scene a few years back. I have talked to Patrice Scribe about his (original) win32.tlb project. I have even got the source to the OpenGL 1.2 type library as I was starting a project intended to update the type library to 1.3. I used DirectX5 in VB (Note: Before Microsoft ever even considered VB as a viable platform for DX development - thus there was no official DX support), and used to play with all kinds of interesting things!

1) Arrays. VB arrays are slow, and clunky. This is because they are not real arrays, but rather ''safearrays''. Ever tried to lock a DirectDraw surface in VB to get access to the pixel data? Well, locking it is simple, but I mean have you tried using that pointer? In C you just cast the pointer to a (BYTE*) and increment the pointer as you iterate through the memory. In VB you had to do it the ''manual'' way - IE get the pointer, create a ''safearray'' using vb structures and code (Which were ripped out of the internals of the VB runtime), copy the memory from the pointer to the safearray, manipulate the memory IN the array and then you had to write it back. Interesting technique, but painfully slow.

2) Pointers. We''re all programmers here, we''ve all heard of pointers at least, but until you use a language other than BASIC, you wont get to play with them. See #1.

3) Lack of inline assembler. When VB code wasn''t fast enough, it seemed logical that another language was needed. I used to write win32 dll''s in C, and use inline assembler in there. If you wanted ultimate speed, you''d write your dll in NASM, compile the code into an .obj file, and then use the VB (LINK.EXE) linker to make the dll. All very interesting, but not very practical. Some kind of inline assembler would have been nice.

There were other things - but those were the main pitfalls of game development in VB. There were workarounds, but since I learnt C++ I haven''t looked back.