Well, subject says it all Just say what you think of VB as game dev. tool. And maybe compare it to other game dev. tools (C++, Delphi...) HuMaN

No idea, i''ve never used VB, but I can tell you C++ is definitely not a difficult language to learn.

Well, let me put it this way... Remember when you were a little kid playing with legos? There were two kinds, (now there are tons more, but when I used them there were two) the huge duplo blocks, and then the regular smaller blocks from which you could make basically anything. You could make a robot out of the big blocks pretty quickly, and it did what you wanted it to and served its purpose just fine. It was huge and kind of putzy, but it was a robot. Now lets say you made the same robot from the smaller blocks. It was harder to build with the smaller ones, but it was all in all a better robot because you were able to make real joints and more defined features etc. That''s an OK comparison of VB and C++. Obviously the huge, easy to work with blocks represent VB, and the smaller, more difficult to use but more versatile legos are C++. That was a dumb comparison, but I hope it gets the point across. Also, VB is slower than C++. I don''t care what anyone says, but C++ will always be faster than VB. Flame on.

"You are too useless. And now I must beat you." - English subtitle in a Honk Kong Movie.

I''ve done my fair share of VB programming and I can tell you it''s not worth the trouble. Sure VB makes programming easy... but right there you have to stop and think. If there is any one idea that holds constant in the realm of progamming it''s that everything is a trade off. You don''t get that ease of use for nothing. You sacrafice performance, platform independance, and low level control (not great for gaming if you ask me). Oh and let''s not forget about those horrible runtime libraries you have to bundle with your executable. Not to mention VB is so weakly typed it''s scary. Seriously VB let''s you get away with murder, my two biggest gripes are automatic type casting and variant declarations. Sure they have their uses, but they abstract you from the variables and make the code difficult to follow. And where are the pointers? I love the fact you have to go above and beyond just to even attempt to declare one. Okay I think I better bring my rant to a close here... I''m starting to hyper ventilate...

{My advice stick with C, or if you need a RAD tool use Delphi.}

I use VB just about every day. That said, most of my projects are desktop front ends and report generators for various databases. VB is a RAD tool, and it does that well. It is slower than C++ , and it does use a virtual machine (1.9 MB I think), *BUT* it is COM aware, and you can Access The WinAPI. Which means that you almost have access to all the low-level API calls that C++ has, but you have to jump through some hoops sometimes.
The key is VB is COM aware - partition your project between the ease of VB for user interfaces, and non-speed critical portions, and C++ were the bare-metal raw power is needed.

Admittedly, I''m not talking game programming here, but here''s an example. We have an application that integrates VB, C++, and SQLServer 7.0. The program basically transmits the data formats of various other systems that need to talk to each other, but don''t understand each others message (TCP/IP) formats. Right now it translates and rearranges data in a delimited, FIXED or HL-7 format. So the point of all this is: The translation portion of the application is a COM dll originally written in VB. That version maxed out at about 400 records (messages) per second. Rewriting the dll in C++ has us up over 2000 records per second right now. There is still some optimizations that can be made, but we''re leaving it alone for now - at least until we hook in more systems.