Hi, Liam. When you do make the jump from VB to something else just know languages, the good ones, now use an oop design structure. I personally can't live without object oriented programming in games. It makes programming much easier, you can re use code much easier, any changes made to the underlying class can effect one or more classes and objects, and well it is just plane better. Think about a small example to get your thoughts flowing on how cool this is. Let's say you have a spaceship game and you want to have a procedure, method, function, sub whatever you want to call it that updates the shields on every friendly and enemy ship in the game. There is a hard way to do this and an easy way to do this. So let's compare the two.
In structured programs, one not using oop, you might write a procedure that does something like this Sub UpdateShields() if(shipShields1 < 100) shipShields1 = 100 End If if(shipShields2 < 100) shipShields2 = 100 End If End Sub If you never used an object oriented design you might think the above sub was really cool. Sure it works, but if you have several enemy ships you are going to be testing every ship, and coding your brains out when you can write one if statement in VB .net and update all ships at once. Now, look at a cleaner way of doing this. class Ship ' ship shield variable Private shipShields As Integer ' Update all ships shields Public Sub UpdateShields() if(shipShields < 100) shipShields = 100 End If End Sub End Class On the surface of this you are probably wondering what is the point of this class, and how do I save time, coding, whith this. Ok, lets say you have several objects labeled ship1 through ship5. Let's show you how to update them quickly. ' Check to see if shields ' are at 100 for all ships public Sub ChargeShields() ship1.UpdateShields() ship2.UpdateShields() ship3.UpdateShields() ship4.UpdateShields() ship5.UpdateShields() End Sub For this simple example the point might not seam so big a deal. However, when you work with massive programs where several things need updated from lasers, shields, missiles, whatever an oop design pays off in the end. You end up saving time coding, the code is cleaner, and instead of an update function which checks every ships shield variable directly it is up to the class to do that for you. Not only that. You can take this class file and rename it, modify it, and use it it in your next game project. You can also use it hole if your game is an other spaceship style game. All the code is there, and all you have to do is reference the class by creating objects to access the data. _______________________________________________ Gamers mailing list .. [email protected] To unsubscribe send E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] You can visit http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org to make any subscription changes via the web.
