[webmin]

Hi, I recently bought a PC for a friend that came with Vista Home Premium. Well one of the games she has called the Same Game no longer works properly. It was originally built as a Unix game and was ported to Windows 3.1 back in '93. This game has worked all the way up to XP, and it even plays on Vista, however certain parts of the game board is cut off and of course there is no way to resize the window. I've tried changing all the compatibility settings for it and nothing seems to work. Here is a link to the game. If you have XP you can see what exactly has to go into this game to rebuild it. If you have Vista please look at it and see what problems it experiences.

Anyways I've started rebuilding the game in Visual Basic, however I am very new at Visual Basic and Programming in general. So I really need some help. So far I've put a few things together, but like I said I don't know enough to put the whole thing together. So those of you with XP, please check out the game, because when I recreate this I need to be able to create it and make it work exactly how you see it.

So far I have created the tile pieces for the game, I've put together a basic menu like the one you see in the game, and the Exit, and About options are the only one's that work so far. This is what I still have to do:

• Place all tiles on the board randomly filling a 20*10 setting or 25*15
  
• Make New Game option replace the current game with a new randomly placed set
  
• Make Replay option start the current board over
  
• Option Undo should be able to back the player up through their last 10 moves
  
• Option Score should list the 10 highest scores
  
• Option Information should list each tile piece and what they represent
  
• Sound Options are not so important, it will most likely irritate my friend
  
• Under the Size option under Option menu the game should start as regular where I have 20*10 tiles on the mat. Large should set it to 25*15. Also I would like the game to remember what it was set on the last time
  
• Tiles are not important seeing as she'll only play the game one way
  
• I need a score system one that will recognize when a tile is clicked on, it will recognize how many of the same tiles are touching its side and highlight them and calculate a score based on this formula n²–3n+4
  For example if you select Tile A and there are six other tile touching on the sides (corners don't count) it should be 7²–3*7+4 = 32, and it needs to highlight all seven of those tiles and change the background color to white.
  
• It needs to be setup so that double clicking the highlighted tiles removes them from the board, and whatever the points total for that selection should be added to the total score.
  
• If someone selects a set of tiles, but they don't want to remove them then selecting another set of tiles will remove the highlight from that one and place it on the new set you just clicked on, or just remove the selection period.
  
• I'm not so worried about help or about options at the moment
  
• Set up a ranking system for the high scores where it will figure out if you score is higher than any of the ten there it will prompt you for your name if so, and place it in the correct rank. Also include a feature to clear the high scores

I think that's what lays ahead of me in building this app. I do understand that you won't just give me the answers, and that's why I am asking you to point me to resources. However if you do decide to contribute code or directions on how to accomplish certain things, I will be sure to give you due credit when the program is finished.

Thanks for any help you provide I am looking forward to getting this completed.

Edit: By the way I am writing this in Visual Basic Express 2005, however I can move it over to VS 2005 Pro edition if need be. Let me know if that will help.

This post has been edited by webmin: 11 September 2008 - 05:45 PM

[baavgai]

This game? The link describes scoring.

For ease of design, I'd create a user control for cell. You can simply place all the cells statically and change how they display. I'm afraid that's all I'd offer because programming in VB makes me sad. It does sound like a excellent first game project, though. I'd consider writing it in C# for amusement.

If you ask the all knowing google, you should find many iterations of this, including VB.NET. One of it's aliases is ClickMania!

[webmin]

If you would like I'd be happy to work on this in C# with your help. Like I said I have VS 2005 which has C# so it's not a problem. Quite frankly this will be a learning experience for me.

Thanks for the quick reply and let me know what we can do.

Oh and by the way I know I wanted to use the scoring that Ikuo Hirohata used

This post has been edited by webmin: 11 September 2008 - 06:27 PM

[baavgai]

To be fair there are probably more VB.NET gurus than C#. Pick what makes you most comfortable, start writing some code, post it when you get stuck. There are lots of folks here to help. You'll learn more by fighting it and only asking when the wall you've hit starts taking on the shape of your head.

Have fun.

[webmin]

See that's the thing though I am stuck. Basically if I can't get those tiles randomly placed on the game mat, I have no where to go, because if there's no game to play, then there's no point to placing all the other features in. So what I need to do is find out how to get those 5 tiles into the game and then go from there.

I have to tell you that whether I do this in C# or VB, I'm still going to be out of my comfort zone, because I don't know either. Don't get me wrong, I don't want people to do this for me, I want to learn this, I just need a place to start learning from.

[baavgai]

You're not placing tiles randomly on a mat. Rather, you're creating a game board and placing the pieces on the board. Think of a chess board. The board is 8x8, and each cell in the grid can contain a piece or be empty. The board positions don't move, their contents do.

If you simply make a form and lay out a grid of controls, like buttons or picture boxes, then you're done with the form design. You then write the logic for what is displayed in each of those controls. For randomly filling the controls initially, think of it like shuffling a deck of cards. Load them up with the base set and then just randomize that.

If it makes it easier, start with a two dimensional array and a console project. The values are 0-4, 0 being empty. If you can get that working, then you can apply that logic to the visual part of the game.