Ethin what on earth do you mean you made a Windows 7.1? You're implying you rewrote windows, which is a blatant lie. That level of programming is far beyond visual basic, and I doubt you have such skills.

That is indeed something to consider laugh. Speaking of which I must get back to working on that version of iOS that runs on tabbies

Now that would be interesting, a touch sensitive system where it keeps moving itself around under your fingers...

Kaigoku, yes, I do use visual basic for my audio games.  In my opinion, the language is very easy to learn compared to most of the other languages out there.  As a sighted user, I use the mouse for almost every aspect of my time on the computer, and programming with visual basic is no exception.  Because of this, I don't even know where I would Begin! using visual basic if I was using only the keyboard.  Of course, this isn't saying much since I would be equally lost even trying to browse the internet or check my email if I couldn't use the mouse.  I guess I'm just not the right person to answer that question.  Jim Kitchen uses the same version of Visual basic that I use, and he is blind.  I guess that must count as evidence that it is accessible.

It is always important to take certain things into consideration before picking which language you will learn first though!  People will always disagree about which things are most important, when programming, but no matter how you will personally form your opinions, you absolutely Must! know the topics that are to be considered.

If you want to design games for mac or linux, then Visual basic is probably not right for you.  If you are looking to learn correct programming processes to use in other things besides audio games, then you may not want to start with Visual basic.  VB (visual basic) has a very specific way it can be used, in order to get the most advantage out of it.  The language is filled with time saving short cuts, meant to allow rapid development of small to medium scale windows applications.  This doesn't make the language any less important than any other, but it does mean there are projects it is intended for, and project types it is Not.  Let me break this down with a real life example.

Lets say that Visual basic is a pair of gardening sheers.  Another language, like C-sharp, is a pair of kitchen scissors, and Java might be craft scissors that form cuts that are zig zag patterns or something.  There is really no way to put any of the scissors down as tools, unless you put them into the context of some situation.  If you are making decorations for some event, the craft scissors can make the decorative cut in seconds!  If that is the task you are trying to perform, there is simply nothing better!  The large garden sheers couldn't do the job at all, and the kitchen scissors can mimic the results but it would take 50 times longer to do.

If you needed to trim the bushes around your house, any of the 3 scissors types would technically be capable of doing the job, but clearly the garden sheers are intended for this purpose.  The other scissor types would require a dozen cuts to do the same as a single cut from the sheers.  In this same way, sometimes a certain language simply cannot do a job, and other times it can but is much slower because it is not the most effective tool for the job.

The argument about languages occurs most often when people are envisioning the task differently.  If you could only take 1 of these scissors home with you from a store, you and another person might argue if he is expecting to trim bushes and you are expecting to cut tags off of the new clothes you just bought.  When people argue about programming languages, it will almost always come down to examples about situations the current language is not well suited for.  As long as you know the advantages and disadvantages, you will be able to make an educated decision about what to do.

It is very difficult to say what a particular language can and cannot do.  The lists are sometimes hidden in gray area, and you must take the developer's ingenuity into account.  The best solution is to look at examples that have been made with a language.  If you are looking to create something, but don't know if it can be done in Visual Basic 6.0, see if something similar was done by either myself, or Jim Kitchen.  Both of us have written our games with this language.  My apologies for any other VB6 developers who I'm failing to mention.  I hope this helps, even though I went off on a long rant.

On the other hand using kitchen scissors to trim a hedge will give a much smoother result in the end. Sometimes you need the extra finesse and sometimes you don't, like you said it depends on the circumstances.

As you pointed out though Visual Basic has practically no cross-compatibility with systems other than Windows.

Of course I would argue that as yet audio games aren't complex enough that Visual Basic's lesser efficiency in performance is a major factor. For complex mainstream games you're going to get laughed at if you try using VB of course but for our purposes it's probably fine, so long as you only want to run it on Windows.

Very true, little is ever black and white in life let alone in these decisions.

Of course audio games for mobile devices probably will need more efficiency than VB can provide, but equally I don't believe those platforms support VB anyway. This may or may not become an issue when Windows 8 introduces support for ARM processors but for now it isn't an issue.

OK. If your saying that Jim Kitchen made his games in Visual Basic, and he's totally blind, its worth trying to learn Visual Basic. It requires a lot of dragging of the mouse, but if I can get in contact with him, I could probably get some methods of using vb6 to produce games such as the ones that he produced.

hello dhruv.
What can I do to program with vb6?
Can you give step by step instruction how to get started with visual basic?

hi.
I think the file is to configure visual basic to get more accessible.

hi kaigoku,
sorry, they are jaws scripts. if you don't use jaws, then I don't have any another resorse. I think you contact with jim kitchin?
and for those who use jaws,
there is a little tutorial about it on
here

CAE_Jones, you are definitely right about Lunimals slowing down when you have huge populations with no food.  Basically the game is looping through each hungry animal, which then loops through each other animal, and calculates distance, resistance to attack, speeds to out run a predator, and several other things.  If you had 500 animals, then on each tick all of those calculations have to be done a quarter of a million times!  When I designed the game, I didn't imagine people would ever be working with that large of populations, so I would have designed it a little differently had I known.  Oh well, it comes back to your point about using experience to avoid problems you would run in to.  This is a good example of how I didn't plan for the proper work load, so I ended up with lag when there wouldn't have been any if I'd designed it differently.

It's a shame BGT isn't free because it seems to be an excellent tool for new developers who are just getting started.  I haven't really worked with it beyond helping a few people debug stuff they were writing, but it is clearly geared well toward audio games so the new developers won't have to waste time figuring out how to steer their programs down this very specific road.  Most languages seem to expect that you will be using graphical elements to display your information, so creating accessible programs takes extra steps and planning.  Even languages that just dump text into a console probably need a little more tweaking to make them easily read by the screen readers, though I'm not really sure if they do or not.

Aprone, BGT has three versions, one of which is free. The free version doesn't let you compile your code into a .exe file, and has a couple features restricted, but it's otherwise fully functional so long as the user has BGT installed.

kaigoku, do you mean visual studio 6 or jaws 4? The last time I checked (which wasn't particularly recently) old versions of jaws were still available somewhere on the freedomscientific website ( www.freedomscientific.com ).

Whenever I'd experiment with trying to learn VB, I'd always poke around macros in microsoft word, which I'm sure was a terrible idea.