Congratulations to Reed Kimble, our VB Guru winner for May 2013! To find all the competitors for May (and more information about this monthly contest), see the Wiki article: TechNet Guru Awards, May 2013.
Reed won with this fantastic contribution:
Here are our three winners:
 | Visual Basic Technical Guru - May 2013 |
| Reed Kimble | How to Create Video Games in VB.Net (Windows Forms) |
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| Paul Ishak | How to convert a 32bit integer into a color |
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| Paul Ishak | Virtual memory in Visual Basic.Net |
|
Here is an excerpt from the article:
How to Create Video Games in VB.Net (Windows Forms)
I realize that this is a very popular subject, especially amongst budding developers. The drive to create games may be the reason you started working with Visual Basic in the first place. After stepping through a few samples and getting the hang of working with user controls on a form, it may be very tempting to start to throw some PictureBoxes and a Timer on a Form and start to implement some game logic. Seems easy enough, right?
To some extent, this is a true statement. You could start to do this and it would be easy enough… at first. But when you begin to try to calculate collision and animate or rotate your “sprites”, you may start to run into some difficulty. And attempts to circumvent the problems often lead to even worse issues. This can cause an endless spiral of misery which could leave you thinking VB just isn’t meant to make games! ;)
The initial problem that most people face is the desire to use a PictureBox (or any other control) as the logical “Sprite” container for the elements in the game. It makes sense since the control appears to provide a lot of the required functionality already and it’s easy to extend it with more properties as needed.
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Read the entire article here:
Thanks again to Reed for a great contribution! Are you ready for a new group of winners for June! We're almost there!
Wiki while you work! (or whilst on break)
- Ninja Ed