IPhone, a few questions from a newbie

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Ozden79

Hello There,

First of all, I would like to congratulate the creators of GLBasic for creating such a simple and fantastic language for creating applications. I was thrilled when I first saw it especially after seeing the support for IPhone.

Just to say a hello to the community, let me introduce myslef a bit. I'm a guy who started his programming carreer as a game developer on C64 in early 90s (In early 10s as well  :)). After some break because of university, I returned to application development bussiness in 1999 starting with Visual Basic and nowadays runing my own bussiness using latest Microsoft technologies such as WPF, Silverlight, Windows Forms and ASP.Net in C#. For the last few years, I always wanted to find a path to return in game development. Last year, I had an attempt to create a game on Windows Mobile using some other language/engines but quickly realized that was a good amount of learning curve which I had not enough time. After that, IPhone got my attention and while I was exploring for ways to code on it, I finally came across GLBasic and it made me more than happy to see that finally I'll be able to return to my game development roots. I fired up the editor and within 5 minutes had already created the a fade in/out splash screen, it was that easy... :enc:

Anyway, to go back to the reason of my post, as I mentioned,  my main focus is to create games on IPhone. As I saw there is a great community in here in the forums of GLBasic, before diving much further into the coding, I wanted to ask a few questions related with GLBasic+IPhone to eliminate the mistakes that I'll make. Here they are :

1)  For my first game, I'll use the Landscape mode. From my understanding, there is no out of box support to define landscape mode and I've to rotate all the sprites that I'm going to draw and also need to map the mouse coordinates. Is that correct? Will it have a big impact on performance so maybe I should have all the sprites pre-rotated from start in their file form?

2) In GLBasic, is there any way to set breakpoints into command lines and step over like in other IDEs?

3) Correct me if I'm wrong but there is multi thread support as well. Is it feasable to use it to load images/sounds in between game states (menu, level) where I can show an animation while loading?

I think that's all for start. Expect more questions begging for your help... :nw:

Kind Regards,

Ãâ€"zden Irmak

Kitty Hello

0) a warm welcome
1) The landscape mode is there. Just go to project/Options and set the resolution for iPhone to 480x320.
2) Use F9 to set a BP, and F10 to step over, Ctrl+F10 to step into and Shift+F10 to step out. Debugger button must be enabled.
3) Yes. There is a threads library... uhm... http://www.glbasic.com/forum/index.php?topic=3642.0 here

Excellent idea to use threads for loading stuff and showing a progress bar.

Ozden79

Hi There,

Thanks for taking time and answering my questions. Just one addition to the landscape mode, I had already defined the screen resolution as 480x320, does it mean that my app will run in landscape mode automatically on IPhone/IPhoneTouch?

Thanks again...

Kitty Hello

Yes. If you do this resolution, wit will be landscape.

Ozden79

Thanks a lot for all the answers...

Cheers...