Black Art of Visual Basic Game Programming [Paperback]

Mark Pruett (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1995

This text aims to make creating arcade-style games for Windows easier for programmers. It teaches how to exploit Visual Basic and the Windows API to write games with graphics and full sound.

Product Details

• Paperback: 539 pages
• Publisher: Waite Group Pr; Pap/Dskt edition (June 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1571690050
• ISBN-13: 978-1571690050
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,534,294 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Extremely basic primer for new Visual Basic programmers, February 3, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Black Art of Visual Basic Game Programming (Paperback)

I would recommend this book as an excellent introduction to Visual Basic. It covers a lot of fun subjects, including sprites, backgrounds, animation, sound effects, scrolling. But it is not at all advanced enough for seasoned programmers. Newcomers to Visual Basic might appreciate its coverage of a few basic Windows API functions, but there are really no general-purpose wrapper functions that are suitable for building a game library. Indeed, the book covered each subject separately, when it would have been more useful to build upon previous subjects. As a result, I was disappointed to find at the end of the book there was no "game programming library" like I expected. I really wanted a function to generate the "mask" images for animating sprites, instead of having to draw the masks manually. The book discussed this, but I could not find a good working example that I could use. However, building the library in VB from all of the examples on the CD (the book covered 16-bit VB3) I was able to paste together a shoddy game library. All in all, great intro to VB...poor coverage of game programming.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book (mainly for VB4.0), December 5, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Black Art of Visual Basic Game Programming (Paperback)

When I first got this book, the latest edition of VB was 4.0. This book was anything and everything you could possibly need. Without this book, I would never know VB like I do today!! If you are planning on buying this book now and you are using a 32-Bit version of Windows, then you will need to change some of the lines of the API code, but otherwise this is an excellent book!!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A good and very complete book !, February 12, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (Belgium) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Black Art of Visual Basic Game Programming (Paperback)

I liked this book because it explains all the techniques that are needed. Sound, Video, bitmap manipulation, ... it is al there. 5 good games, ( I didn't like the RPG and the adventure) have shown me how to write a game. VB 4.0 projects are on the CD.