Customer Reviews

Black Art of Visual Basic Game Programming

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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!!

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.

Chapter 1 might confuse you because it start off showing the programming of a whole game, but after that it takes you through step by step. This book is for people who know alittle VB before starting. At first the book tells you to use and API fuction call BitBlt and how to use it. After you see this technique your imagination will explode, because your eyes will be open to the light. I can't belive how much help this book has been to programming my own video games.

It took a couple reads to figure it all out, but it's turned out to be very handy. Though dated, it still has the basic concepts which are necessary to learn. Once I read this book, game programming got a lot easier.

This book is essential for any beginner to slightly advanced programmer! Everything about it was good. Don't Listen to others who say the code doesn't work, Yeah AFTER you add some gibberish to it it won't but everything works and the book is GREAT

If you are using a computer with a recent version of windows 95, or windows 98, the code in this book won't work, so don't buy it. Frankly, the publishers should have pulled it off the shelves by now.

This book contains alot of information on how to program a variety of games, from action to sports to roleplaying. Unfortunatly it was written for VB3 using windows 3.11 so it is very dated. The book isn't easy to read and I found my self rereading the same page multiple times and continuasly backing up a few pages to remember what a procedure did. This book is like reading the raw source code for a game (all be it well commented source code) that reading a how to book.

Well, this is just about as good as they come. It gives code AND examples. One word describes this book: Perfect

i have not yet read the book but from what i have heard it sounds like it is just what i need to make my first vb project