#vb4 — Public Fediverse posts

Since foone is making #VisualBasic trend, just a reminder to check out my fun #vb4 projects, if you want. Including the OpenGL demo and the GDI-based raycaster, #vbray (see hashtag for source link): https://mastodon.social/@indigoparadox/113360125091578147

It's not VB6 but VB4 is just as good IMO. Even better, since it can run in Windows 3.x!

@muzej I didn't start in general with it, but I started Windows programming with #VB4! (Wish there was more activity on that tag other than... me...) Big improvement over the Commodore days. In some ways, anyway... 😌

Did everyone just know the PictureBox control in #VB4 could print variable-formatted text and just not tell me?

I've been focusing on minput-hop this weekend, so I figured I'd drop what I'd done so far on #vbray into a release for the #vb4 fans out there: https://github.com/indigoparadox/vbray/releases/tag/0.24.2

This version loads levels from CSV and sprites from ICO, and has lower resolution display options and (very wonky) optional mouse controls! Also a fancy custom icon! Go to File > Open and browse to the CSVs in the install directory to begin! If you want! 😌

It takes about 5 seconds to do all the ray calculations when I move or turn a step, but otherwise the sprite animation is right on time and it doesn't bog anything down (since it's almost totally event-driven). For a 486 DX2-55... This isn't bad?

This is running on my Grandpa's old Tandy 4085 EP... He was named Ray (and he's the one who bought this copy of #VB4), so I've thought of him a lot while working on this.

This is working so well with so little effort that it's kinda pissing me off lol... I wish I'd been this clever when I was a teenager and it was relevant...

The sprites are picturebox control arrays. Apparently transparency is a big ask, but there are ways around that. I'd like to keeping it working in 16-bit #VB4 too, tho...

We're not in Lodev town anymore. 😌

I sat down for an hour or two and made a very silly thing that's been on my mind for a while. "What if I did a raycaster, but instead of drawing the lines with pixels, I drew them with a control array of GDI lines in #vb4 ?"

It's been a while since I went wild with cos() and sin(), so I referred heavily to Lodev's tutorial as a refresher on this one (doing it in VB4 is transformative HBomberGuy please do not make a four hour video on me). 🤷‍♀️

Anyway source: https://github.com/indigoparadox/vbray

#vbray

@lastofavari @foone #vb4 is fun because it's full of traps aimed for "business programming" like banker's rounding, calls datatypes weird things (a float is a "single"), just doesn't have some things (like bitwise operations), and is overall very fun and cool (in the Brainfuck sense). It's like if COBOL really were as bad as people say it is! 😌

Some improvements, but I just can't seem to get away from every few launches having a NULL hRC return from wglCreateContext. Seems to happen almost 100% of the time from a compiled EXE.

Source code available so everyone can learn and become #vb4 champions: https://github.com/indigoparadox/vb4gl

So I managed to sit down and get #opengl working on #vb4 while watching a video essay in the background on the brutality of capital punishment by a guy who looked like Matt Walsh's good twin.

Turns out the problem setting the context was pixel format nonsense from GDI. Once I figured that out (and that a 32-bit float in Visual Basic 4 is called a Single), marshaling the calls from Opengl32.dll was simple.

I'm actually impressed! Non-flickery and even the controls sit over it! What fun.