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Visual Basic Game Programming for Teens Review by J. Huber
I have been looking for a book like this, a VB.Net perspective
Overall I find this book good at what it advertises to be, a tour through the process of making a DirectX game in VB that would be very interesting and appealing to a novice programmer (teen). The game is a simplified 2d rpg/adventure game, called `Celtic Crusader'. While functional, in the interest of simplicity and time by the author's own words it isn't a fully featured game, it lacks features such as character inventory or network play.
If you are looking for detailed information on DirectX, this is not the book. This book does not explain the DirectX methods used, or even display their signatures, it just tells you what the routine you are coding does as a whole, and gives you the code.
I currently work in VB.Net, but I am experienced in the last few incarnations of VB, so the conversion of the provided code examples into VB.Net is not much of a problem. I would say someone familiar with VB.Net but without experience in VB6 will not have much problem; in fact the DirectX method calls in VB.Net are more logical than in VB6.
For example
d3ddev.Present(ByVal 0, ByVal 0, 0, ByVal 0)
becomes
d3ddev.Present(Handle.zero,Handle.zero, 0, Handle.zero)
If you pay attention to the intellisense balloons then the DirectX method calls are fairly easy to figure out.
The author doesn't fully qualify all his references, so be aware and supply the appropriate qualifacation for the constants. Be sure to Imports DxVBLibA
For example
d3dpp.SwapEffect = D3DSWAPEFFECT_DISCARD
becomes
d3dpp.SwapEffect = CONST_D3DSWAPEFFECT.D3DSWAPEFFECT_DISCARD
The VB side of the code is the same (an If-Then is still If-Then) except that you will need to recognize form events as such by their names instead of their handles keyword.
The DirectX8 for Visual Basic type library reference is still available with DirectX9.0c in VB.Net (just look under the Com tab when adding the reference) and seems to work fine in XP (I have tried it on 3 different machines.) I have not worked through the entire book yet, but so far I have not had any problems with compatibility.
This book is thinner than the typical programming book (tome) you normally find. It leads the reader directly through the creation of this adventure game, cutting out many side details as mentioned earlier. However, I find it delivers enough to create a decent working game, and a nice resource for a programmer looking for straightforward code examples.