VBGamer

Full screen mode doesn't show the entire world, although it's still playable. Aside from that it's very nice. I especially like the MarioVGL example, although mario seems to slide a bit too much.

I have always used VGL for its simplicity, but have recently turned over to directX because of its open FPS and power. I may though move to DirectX2d+ engine. But VGL surely is the best and taught me a lot of things! Nice work!

Thanks. My emphasis has always been on simplicity, and I really want to offer VGL as an alternative to using VB's intrinsic controls for games. There's always a tradeoff between ease of use and flexibility. DirectX, at it's rawest, is probably the most flexible option, although I bet anyone who plans to use DirectX will probably end up creating his own wrapper. And that's all there is to it. If you can make your own wrapper, then do it. However, if time development is an issue, you can always use wrappers, and there's a lot of them out there aside from VGL. There's Vampire's Universal Hunter. There's Dabooda's Engine (wotta name). There's the DXEngine. Invite people to use DirectX wrappers instead of VB controls (although using BitBlt is ok). Thanks again!

To sdw: What do you mean by "Full screen mode doesn't show the entire world" ?

Whoops, all I had to do was make a few adjustment to the monitor settings. But I still stand by my complaint of the controls being too difficult! :)

If Mario's sliding too much, press down. He'll duck and speed down. Do it either running or even while jumping.

This is a pretty nice wrapper. Its a good foundation to start with, I see this being really good, if you keep updating it and building on. So far its impressive and easy, I would recommend this one for beginning game programmers, its pretty easy to use. The only thing I found annoying was having to state everything in the loop. I think the engine, just needs to control a little bit more of the mundane things. Of course I gave it a quick look over and you might have some more features, I just didn't see. DaBooda out...

VGLayer.amPlayMusicSegment [Play Continuously] does not play the midi file repeatedly. It only played the MIDI file once and stop. How can I make the background music play in a endless loop during the game ? Thanks, Tester

Put it in a DO...LOOP structure, sandwiched between lBeginCycle and lEndCycle. Sorry for the delay of response!

Hello Hotrodx, I had been using VGL 1.3 in WinME and VB6 with success. It is so easy to learn that my 10 year old son was able to pick it up and did some simple game development in a couple of weeks. Thanks. I then purchased him an HP laptop with WinXP SP2 on it and tried to port the VGL developed games into the new environment. Most of the games run without mofidication. However, there were an error that keep poping up every once in a while during the game: Run-time error 80004005 automation error unspecified error This error occured both in games developed by my son and sample game (e.g. starforce) downloaded from your site. In addition, I was no longer able to click on the run button within the VB6 development environment to execute the game within VB6 for debugging. Doing so will cause the VB IDE to crash and the famous XP send/dont send to microsoft pop up box showed up. msvcrt.dll seemed to be involved in the crashed. I had to use the make command in VB to create the exe file and run that file to test the game in the laptop WinXP SP2 environment. Any clue on how I can get around these errors ? Any help is appreciated. Regards, Tester

I found a workaround for the above 80004005 error in XP SP2. Just add "On Error Resume Next" to the VB code and the error from VGL is ignored by the system and the game continue to function. Tester