Re: Help with text adventure

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On Aug 7, 9:55 am, Joseph M. Newcomer <newco...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I'm not sure why you say you "don't want to use Visual Studio".  News flash: this is the
basic programming tool for Windows.  There is even a express version (although it doesn't
have MFC) which is free.  You can do raw Win32 programming and do everything I suggested,
it is just less convenient.

You can also just write a console app with printf and getline, as an extreme case.
                                        joe


Is there a way to make a Win32 console application?

I'm not sure I know the right language to use to describe what I want.
Basically I want a program that is all text, like ASCII text, you
know, and the background is blakc, and the text is white, and there's
no menus, and it's full screen, and basically it looks like a DOS
application, except the resolution may be higher or kept the same as
whatever the user's current resolution is, and it's a Win32 app rather
than DOS, because I don't want to try to make people run a DOS program
on XP, Vista, etc in this day and age, and if I did I would just
include DOSbox with the program and a batch file to make it run with
DOSBox, but that seems kind of ridiculous because it's the year 2008.
So can I just use the C language and Notepad and then with a C
compiler make a win32 app that runs in full screen like this? Or is it
that people normally learn with Visual Studio and they use the pull-
down menus to add-in code chunks and stuff, and they can't really
program without using the IDE? I'll try the IDE, I'll try the Express
version in a minute. Yesterday as I said I was having trouble
downloading it. It was taking a while and seemed to be freezing during
the download/install process. Still, it seems like a lot to download
just to do the kind of simple application I'm talking about. It may be
wiser for me to do this in QuickBASIC using DOSBox and then port it to
Win32 using FreeBASIC, even though that's not supposed to be a very
good program in comparison to PowerBASIC. I suppose it doesn't make
sense to use GDI or GDI+, but I thought that was what handled the
windowing process of Windows, like it was behind any Windows program.
I guess it makes more sense to go with DirectX, but again, why learn
all that directx stuff when I just want to make the equivalent of a
console app? It was annoying to me, though, running QuickBASIC in XP,
without DOSBox, because it ran that Virtual DOS Machine program in the
background (ntvdm.exe) and my little laptop here was like "wft?!" and
the fan kept whirring because it was using up so many CPU cycles. I
found that really lame that Windows doesn't come with a DOS emulator
that's any good. Anyway, as I said I'll probably just do this in
QuickBASIC and/or DirectX (using C or C++). I'll try the VS Express
thing, but it's probably some 700MB program that makes 800kb-size
"hello world" programs...
.

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