Hi Kevin,
I have a VFPer friend, semi-retired, and keen to develop some strategy games in VFP. It's an ideal language to do the data crunching. I suggested to him to look into Direct-X APIs, not knowing at all what might be involved. Is it possible to use VFP to run behind the scenes and make API calls using other utilities to handle all screen/mouse/keyboard I/O?? Anybody?
If it was, I'd even get interested myself, since I'm going to hang up one of my boots and spurs, at least :-), next year.

>Hello!!
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>Being an avid gamer and having written games in previous lives, I of course was naturally curious as to how a game would work written in VFP. After various experimentations I have written the framework for a side scrolling platform game written solely in VFP (On my off hours, of course :)). This framework includes sound routines, joystick routines, smooth scrolling, and object collision and detection routines. I basically used subclassed image object as the different items that can be picked up, moved, walked on etc. I use sys(1270) as my collision detection routine. All of this works great except for ONE thing. You guessed it. TOO SLOW. On a P3 system with say 600mhz or higher processor everything works great. But running on a P2 with say a 300mhz it's just a little too slow.
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>My question to all you API gurus out there is if you might know a way to use API calls (maybe BITBLT) to move an object instead of just repositioning the left and top properties of it as I am doing now. If I could speed up the moving of the actual main sprite character perhaps using API calls then it could run on a slower system.
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>Other than that, I am amazed at how professional this game is looking using a language like VFP without doing hardly any low level stuff. It's a totally different way to do object collision and detection than what I've done in the past but very interesting.
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>Any thoughts or comments would be very much appreciated.
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>Thanks!