A Little Update

 How time flies

At the time of writing, it has been 4 months since my last post. In that time, I have had little time to look at the recreated source code for my adventure game but I have made some progress

I have decided that I did not like myself very much. The code is undocumented and used variable names that are not very descriptive. I can guess what some of them mean but the others will take some working out as I follow the logic through my code.

Documentation

I know I need to document the code and create some flow charts. The trouble is this is the bit I hate the most but it has to be done so I can understand the code again and recreate the game on modern platforms. So, I will break out Visio and get to work and get heavy with the REM statements.

Code Structure

I have certainly learned a lot since 1986. As I look at my code I can see many ways I could do it better, way too much jumping around using GOSUB and RETURN. However back then we could not create subroutines (using Procedure and Functions) that you could call, at least not in the version of BASIC I was using.

What Language?

So I always said I would recreate the game to play exactly as it was back in 1986 but reprogrammed in a modern language. To this end, I have been looking around for modern implementation of the BASIC programming language as a good place to start before I branch out to other languages. 

I have settled on using QuickBasic64 which is open source, backward compatible, and allows many modern features such as calls to windows DLLs and displaying PNG files, etc. 

QB64.org – BASIC for the modern era