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Hello Everyone...

I am somewhat new to The Game Creators (TGC) tools and products, though I have been tracking the company for a very long time. I have seen nothing but constant improvement and innovation with their products and tools over the years. As a result, the tools that TGC now offers should be more than powerful enough to allow military history enthusiasts who are also developers and engineers the ability to re-expand the once very popular genre of the pc-based war game or what is more commonly called the strategy game.

Such games are based on hexagonal map boards\screens, which are often maddeningly difficult to develop and implement. Prior to my recent conversion over to the AGKSharp extension for Visual Studio, I was developing such a game using the MonoGame Game Engine. Due to the lack of documentation, practically every aspect of working with this engine, as solid as it was, was a new major research endeavor. When I finally had come to the point where I needed an interface to start controlling certain aspects of my own game, there was little to be had and the truly legitimate available tool lacked substantial documentation that provided the where withall to use the tool.

As a result, I decided to give AGKSharp a try. I am finding that I have been able to provide certain functionality within a very short time whereas this same functionality using MonoGame took weeks of testing and tinkering to get right.

To help those along who would like to invest in such development, I am going to post all my source code to this thread, which can be easily transposed over to the AppGameKit Editor if that is what is preferred. My code will be in VB.NET making the transposition to AppGameKit Basic relatively easy. Just note that where I may use classes, AppGameKit Editor users will need to put such code in "include" files if they wish to keep it separate.

My first upload will be a demonstration of how to scroll a map board, which is taken directly from the AppGameKit Editor Tutorial Guide #1. I hope to upload this code shortly as I first want to clean up the initial code-base for interested AppGameKit developers so that it is easily understood. I will also add comments to help AppGameKit Editor users transpose my own code into their own.

I look forward to everyone's comments and suggestions here...

Steve Naidamast
Sr. Software Engineer

As promised earlier, I have cleaned up my initial project's code so that it is easier to understand. There are also notes in the primary module, "MainModule.vb", which should be read to help you understand how this code was developed.

The code has been uploaded to the forums download area.

If anyone needs any help or clarification, please leave a note on this thread.

Steve Naidamast
Sr. Software Engineer

What do you do when you need a database engine for your game development and you are using the AGKSharp Toolkit???

For AppGameKit developers there appears to be support for the use of SQLite with a plugin... I found the following link for AppGameKit developers who may require storing their data in database system... https://forum.thegamecreators.com/thread/219939

Whether you are an AppGameKit developer or an AGKSharp developer, at some point, if you develop a complex game system, you are going to require a database engine of some type. The SQLite Database Engine is an extremely powerful, embedded database system. However, working as I have with typed database engines for many years, I much prefer the typed aspects of such databases over that of SQLite.

If you are working with the AGKSharp Toolkit or plan to do so and will need the use of a database engine, you have two very powerful options at your disposal, if like me, you prefer to work with a typed database engine. Such options would be MySQL for large scale games that would be multi-player or Firebird, which can handle both large scale operations with the server edition as well as individual desktop games with the embedded version. However, getting access to these database engines require one of two options, an ORM framework, which in business development has become a rather popular option, or direct ADO access in the Microsoft .NET world.

As I have been a user of the Microsoft Visual Studio development environment since its commercial release in 2001, this is my preferred technology for development.

For Python and Java users, who can also take advantage of using the AppGameKit Engine with these development languages there are a variety of database options for the same databases just mentioned. However, not being such a developer, I am not familiar with the connection\access techniques from these languages, with the exception of Java's JDBC database access technology.

Nonetheless, if you are planning on using Visual Studio, than I can provide such developers with two ADO Data Access Layers, both of which are freely available and Open Source, for both the MySQL and Firebird database engines. They both come with complete source code and documentation as to how each can be used with many examples. In addition, a complete test-client is provided, which the code can be used for your own purposes.

You may download either of these ADO Data Access Layers from the following link on my own site... https://blackfalconsoftware.com/software/

Since the .NET Framework has been updated several times since these components were released, you can easily recompile the solutions\projects to the framework version of your preference. In addition, you may also want to include the latest .NET Connector software available from either the Firebird or MySQL web sites...

Firebird... https://firebirdsql.org/
MySQL... https://www.mysql.com/

If you have any questions regarding either of these components, please feel free to leave them on this thread...

Steve Naidamast
Sr. Software Engineer