Hello there!

I intend to make games like Pokemon, Golden Sun and Zelda for PC only... Well I have two basic questions here.

1. I've been programming in VB for the past 4 years and am quite confident that I'll be able to use it to make small games. My question is that, is VB capable of making big 2D RPGs? As far as my experience goes, all the animation I've made so far on VB almost always feels very jerky and un-natural maybe i'm doing it wrong. And as all the code and data is in one exe file, the whole thing gets very slow. Maybe there's a solution to this that I'm unaware of. These two things compelled me ask this question.

2. When I came across these two thing I decided to learn C++ after reading multiple threads from different forums. But then I saw that it runs command line interface typa thing. And so comes my second (and less important) question. How is C++ used to make those large scale games?

I'm not going to leave C++ of course. I started it to increase my programming skills (not primarily for making games) Was just curious about how it all happens.

Hello there!

I intend to make games like Pokemon, Golden Sun and Zelda for PC only... Well I have two basic questions here.

1. I've been programming in VB for the past 4 years and am quite confident that I'll be able to use it to make small games. My question is that, is VB capable of making big 2D RPGs? As far as my experience goes, all the animation I've made so far on VB almost always feels very jerky and un-natural :mellow: maybe i'm doing it wrong. And as all the code and data is in one exe file, the whole thing gets very slow. Maybe there's a solution to this that I'm unaware of. These two things compelled me ask this question.

I'm not very familiar with basic, i used it many years ago when i learned DarkBasic, but i don't see why a well structured 2d game made in basic would run slow on modern hardware.

2. When I came across these two thing I decided to learn C++ after reading multiple threads from different forums. But then I saw that it runs command line interface typa thing. And so comes my second (and less important) question. How is C++ used to make those large scale games?

C++ itself has no concepts of consoles, windows, or anything else. The standard library makes it easy to communicate with the console, but thats about it. If you want to make a windowed appplication then you either need to learn the platform specefic api for setting up a window, or use an existing framework such as SDL, or SFML, etc. They take care of setting up window/input/sound/graphic aystems. As well they generally provide a layer of abstraction from learning openGL/D3D if your goal is to make 2D games.

You didn't mention it in the actual body of your post, but based on the tags you selected can we assume you're talking about Visual Basic 6, rather than the newer Visual Basic.NET? Microsoft stopped mainstream support for that version of Visual Basic in 2005 (very nearly a whole decade ago), and stopped extended support as of 2008 (six years ago). It's an old an unsupported language and tool set -- that as you've noticed can have some performance issues due to a lack of more modern techniques -- and I really wouldn't recommend trying to use it for a larger project.

Visual Basic.NET is a different story however -- it's still supported and takes advantage of modern techniques, and might make a more suitable choice if you wished to stick with it -- it's not particularly popular however, and as such you may find it more difficult to find help and examples. If used correctly, there's no reason you couldn't use VB.NET to make a large scale RPG of reasonable quality.

Given the differences between modern .NET and VB6 I would suggest you might be better off simply making the jump to the much more popular C# instead if you don't want to use C++.

2. When I came across these two thing I decided to learn C++ after reading multiple threads from different forums. But then I saw that it runs command line interface typa thing.

Like many languages, C++ doesn't have built-in support for graphics, so you use a library such as DirectX, OpenGL, SDL, or SFML to talk to the graphics hardware and allow you to draw graphics. Take a look at these SDL tutorials or the basic SFML tutorials to get a better idea of how this works.

Hope that helps!

Yup, I second the jump to C#, it's not nearly as ugly as C++, and has lots of decent tutorials out there, and game engines that can be leveraged as well.

VB6 should not be used for anything these days. VB.NET is a different story and a much better choice. VB.NET is pretty much line-by-line translatable to/from C# and there are automatic tools for doing it. I would highly recommend C# over VB(.NET) and even more over C++. C and C++ are languages that IMHO every programmer should know, but almost never use.

Thank you everyone for your very helpful replies ^_^ I shall now leave VB6 completely and will concentrate on C++ (c# can wait :p )

A special thanks to jbadams for the detailed answer and tutorial links :) u made things a lot more clear to me.

No. Try RPG Maker Ace, which can be found on Steam.