vb game

How to make a demo of your game When you have created a game and you're ready to distirbute it or post it on the web, you might want to add a demo option.A good idea is to show a brief demo of the action when the game loads,like most commercial games do (ie Quake2).The main issue in creating a demo that fully resembles a user playing the game ,is to somehow emulate the user interface events - be it keyboard,mouse or console events.The most obvious way to do this is by storing a consequence of keywords in a text file and then have the progam translate these keywords as commands from the user.As a matter of fact you can create this text file by simply playing the game: In the procedure that handles user interface events (ie the Form_KeyDown event procedure) add code that will assign a specific keyword to every key that is pressed and then add this keyword to the demo text file.That text file should look something like this: "right" (you pressed the Right cursor key) "fire" (Space Bar) "left" (Left cursor key) "left" (Left cursor key) "fire" (Space bar) "exit" (Esc) When Demo mode is on, the program should open this file ,read each element,generate the proper event and then wait a random period of time before moving on to the next element.The majority of games (except maybe turn-based strategy games) responds to the user's commands in real time and it is somewhat loittering to emulate the actual delay between these commands. This however is not a problem when creating a demo because adding a random delay in between furfiling each command the program inputs from the demo text file should generate equaly realistic results. The VB5 project ShooterDemo is the demo version of a shoot'em up game created with the way described above. *You should run this prorgam in 640x480 screen *resolution otherwise the sprites might not look *alright Theodore Kandiliots,Athens,Greece home page: http://www.forthnet.gr/ionikh/home.htm email : ionikh@ath.forthnet.gr PS. This demo project uses the ModPlug Plug-in (it's the file ndmod32.DLL) by Olivier Lapisque olivierl@jps.net http://www.castlex.com/modplug/home.html