Games written in VB

I've been thinking of writing a game in VB as a hobby / project.

I've got a few questions:

1. What current games have been written in VB.

2. Is VB only really suited to the Shareware card games market.

3. Is it practical and viable to start designing a commercial game in VB?

4. What techniques are there avaiable to improve the speed of compiled VB apps to reach the level desirted by most modern games.

5. How far of languages such as C++ and Delphi is VB in terms of speed nowadays.

Thanks,

Richard.

If you start a commercial game, I advise you to do this in c++. VB can be fast with some complex techniques, but c++ will be always faster. (Correct me if I'm wrong) On http://www.vbaccelerator.com are some techniques for very fast pixel manipulation.

Thanks,

Do you know of any commercial games that HAVE been written in VB?

I don't think there have that have been on any top ten list. None are very popular. But I usually create them for fun or practice. And you could make a few bucks and rip off your friends ;)

I've seen and played some commercial games that have been written in VB. Unfortunately I lost the link for them.

It depends what sort of game you're making, If you're going to make a complicated, fast action game then you want C++, but a different sort of game, some sort of strategy game, or anything that doesn't rely of computing very complicated grephics at blinding speed, even if you do you could write the graphics in C++ and some logic or other parts in VB.


Unless you have a team of people to work with you it's probably not a particularly good Idea to try to write a comercial standard game that relys on its graphics. If you're on your own then need a good idea to make a good game, you're not going to make anything wonderful if you just decide to make a game and don't have the great ideas to make it good without the graphics.

I don't agree with Sam, I think it's better to write the whole game in C++ (for shorter text I'll say "C" instead of "C/C++"), there are many things that are much easier to do in C. For example class heredity which is a very flexible and efficient way to make items, enemy types and such stuff... Of course you can do all of that in VB too, and since we have DirectX support it's nearly as fast as C (well, this depends on the game type ;)), but you'll probably have much more to do for the same things.
You may say: "But in C I have to code sooooo much more things, ie. create the window which is already done for me in VB..." ok, that's correct. But if you once wrote that in C you can use it every time you start a new project again.
However, I'd say there are many games you can do in VB, thats one of the reasons why I also code in VB (our serious projects are all in C). It really depends on you, but I'd recommend you to use C.

And btw, I personally prefer not to use VB things, the only objects I have are a window and a buffer where I draw in my game. And when using DDraw it's only a window...

Let me add my 2 cents. I've developed a direct draw game using VB before. It ran at 1024x768x32..... at a rate of 60fps! One yeah, and I forget now but there were at LEAST 300 sprites being viewed on screen at the same time. The only thing is that only a few of those sprites were tested for collisions each frame... i'm not sure how much things would slow down if i had to test for 40 or so collisions each frame. I haven't done any 3d stuff yet, only because I want to have a near expert knowledge of 2d before I get into the 3d. Oh yeah, you know that Starcraft runs at 640x480x8 and was most likely built with C++? I rest my case. VB may not be quite as fast as C++ is, but it's pretty damn close when you're using DirectX.

Of course DirectX runs at same speed from Vb or C++, why should it not ?

At VBITS http://www.vbits.net Stockholm I was at a seminare about DirectX and VB and they told that the problem with VB was testing for many collisions because VB does not have any fast enougth structure to hold the information.

I can not tell if true or not but they did not recomend VB for a comercial like DOOM.

I disagree that VB doesn't have the proper structures for fast collision detection... at least for 2d. All you need to do is compare the "left", "top", "bottom" and "right" properties of the rect structure to another rect structure and that is collision detection. My guess is that it's the same technique most games in C++ use. Now it's just a matter of how fast the "IF" and "CASE" statements are in VB compared to C++.

If you're looking for a game made in VB, Westwood's C&C2 - Tiberian Sun was made in VB6. I figured this out as it installed the VB6 runtimes for the game. This means that Tiberian Sun must have been made in Visual Basic. It also uses DirectX6. This also proves that Visual Basic can be used to create good games...

See this link