Software of the Month Club 1999 November/SOTMC_Nov1999-Ultimate.iso/mac/REALbasic ƒ/Examples/Applications/whack ƒ/Read Me!

Text File | 1998-08-27 | 1.7 KB | 36 lines | [ttro/ttxt]

This is a game of the "whack-a-mole" type, with Bill Gates cast in the part
of the mole (and a pie in the face signifying when he has been whacked).
Sorry about that.

The purpose of the project was originally to teach myself about timers and
threads. Ultimately, it turned out to be a good demonstration of the use of
control arrays too, as well as the technique for flicker-free scrolling of
a graphic (the final touch, and the hardest part to figure out).

I have commented the code heavily, in the hope that it may be useful to
some other neophyte.

What most impressed me was that, thanks to the convenience of the IDE and
to the use of classes, instantiations, and object messaging, the
development cycle was extremely easy - REALBasic definitely encourages
improvisation - and very little coding was actually required (if we
discount syntactic sugar such as "end if", "dim", and other silly garbage
foist upon us by the essential backwardness of BASIC, it amounted to only
75 or 80 lines).

There are lots of bells and whistles that I never bothered to add. For
instance, the game runs at different speeds on different machines, it
doesn't keep track of high scores, and so on. But those features were
outside the scope of the original project, and after all, one must stop and
declare the thing finished sooner or later.

The project requires REALBasic F5 or later (ie CR1). An unfortunate feature
of the project is that it does not work very well in the IDE - you have to
build the actual application in order to test it. I think this has to do
with some sort of problem with threads and/or redrawing. However, in F4 it
crashed the IDE and didn't run at all in the built app, so I'm not
complaining!

Matt Neuburg
[e-mail]
http://www.tidbits.com/matt/