Hi Kevin
Well, what I meant was that it would be nice to have VFP in the back end doing the number and data crunching (and the AI, which .dbfs are good for!) and use whatever tool to do the user interface. So I'd be thinking C or C# or something, then maybe a VFP dll or COM object which does the real data stuff. Some of my guys here are now getting into providing some COM objects for clients to provide sensible data access while the client stuffs around writing whatever pretty front end they like, eg live displays, intranet pages etc. The performance of these COM things is awesome provided they're "persistant" - ie you don't fire up a new COM object everytime you wan't to access the data.

So, no doubt this is well away from where you are heading; I was just trying to expand the horizon, because VFP is just fabulous for doing this kind of number crunching. In a strategy game in particular, as opposed to the "real time" stuff I would have thought the database capabilities would be of great advantage. If you look behind some of the current games you find whole bunches of text files with hordes of parameter values. That must be a nightmare for the developers to tweak and maintain. Anyway, I digress from my digression...

Cheers...


>Hi David!
>Not sure I follow you. My framework has a joystick routine which seems to work real well which I can't take credit for but was written by another VFPer on the net here. (Sorry, name escapes me at the moment...which is becoming more and more a common thing...um what was I talking about?) Oh yeah, Joystick, sound,and other routines through VFP are in place and work well. As far as making DirectX calls, it is intriguing but not sure how VFP would or could handle it.
>
>> 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.