1. Sprites made easy!
Liberty Basic is develeopped by Carl Gundel Original Newsletter compiled by Alyce Watson and Brosco Translation to HTML: Raymond Roumeas
In This Issue:
Coming Soon:
Programmer's Spotlight
Wanted: Your Ideas!!!
1. Sprites made easy!You may have heard mention of sprites and not known what they were. If you were curious, you may have looked around for enlightenment, but found only complicated, technical explanations. For a short, simple explanation in text and pictures, read the file attached here - it is in *.wri format. (sprite.zip)
If you want those complicated, technical explanations, try the two sprite tutorials available at Alyce's Restaurant:
http://alyce.webjump.com/
2. A new DLL for Liberty BASIC
Until now, there have been two ways to implement sprites in Liberty BASIC. The first way is to call GDI.DLL from LB. This way has two drawbacks. The first is that it takes quite a lot of complicated code to do it. The second is that it works rather slowly. If a lot of sprites are added to the screen at one time, the animation slows down considerably, especially on slower processors.
The other way to do sprites is by far the best method. It uses SpriteMD.DLL. This is a powerful game engine written for LB by Brosco. It makes animation very simple. Among its many functions are: cycle through frames of animation, detect out-of-bounds, detect collisions, tile and scroll backgrounds, monitor keyboard input, add text or flashing text to the screen.....the list goes on and on!
To have a look at this wonderful shareware DLL, go to:
http://users.orac.net.au/~brosco/spritemd/spritemd.htm
The only drawback to SpriteMD isn't really a drawback, but an advantage. It has many, many functions. This could be just a little bewildering to the first-time game or graphics programmer.
If you would like to learn a bit about using sprites and writing games before jumping into SpriteMD, you might want to try the new DLL, LBsprite.DLL. It is NOT a powerful, complete game engine. It just makes it fast and easy to draw sprites on the screen. It only has a few, simple function calls. This DLL is a good way to learn some of the basics of sprite animation.
Instead of making many calls to GDI to place a sprite on the screen, here is a sample function call from LBspite.DLL:
CallDll #lbs, "DrawSprite",_ 'call the function hWnd as short,_ 'graphicbox handle hBmp as short,_ 'bitmap handle x as short,_ 'x location of sprite y as short,_ 'y location of sprite r as short 'returns nonzero if successful
Be sure to read the textfile that is included with the DLL and try out the sample programs. To get it, please go to Alyce's Restaurant: http://alyce.webjump.com/
Please send comments about LBsprite.DLL to me at: awatso-@wctc.net
Thanks very, very much!
Alyce
Comments, requests or corrections: Hit 'REPLY' now!