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The Liberty Basic Newsletter - Issue #31 - MAR 99
"Knowledge is a gift we receive from others."
		- Michael T. Rankin
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In This Issue:

1.  Sprites made easy!
2.  A new DLL for Liberty BASIC
          by Alyce Watson
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Coming Soon:
Programmer's Spotlight
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Wanted:  Your Ideas!!!
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1.  Sprites made easy!

You may have heard mention of sprites and not known what
they were.  If you were curious, you may have looked
around for enlightenment, but found only complicated,
technical explanations.  For a short, simple explanation
in text and pictures, read the file attached here - it is
in *.wri format.  (sprite.zip)

If you want those complicated, technical explanations, try
the two sprite tutorials available at Alyce's Restaurant:
http://alyce.webjump.com/
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2.  A new DLL for Liberty BASIC

Until now, there have been two ways to implement sprites in
Liberty BASIC.  The first way is to call GDI.DLL from LB.
This way has two drawbacks.  The first is that it takes
quite a lot of complicated code to do it.  The second is
that it works rather slowly.  If a lot of sprites are added
to the screen at one time, the animation slows down
considerably, especially on slower processors.

The other way to do sprites is by far the best method.  It
uses SpriteMD.DLL.  This is a powerful game engine written
for LB by Brosco.  It makes animation very simple.  Among
its many functions are:  cycle through frames of animation,
detect out-of-bounds, detect collisions, tile and scroll
backgrounds, monitor keyboard input, add text or flashing
text to the screen.....the list goes on and on!

To have a look at this wonderful shareware DLL, go to:
http://users.orac.net.au/~brosco/spritemd/spritemd.htm

The only drawback to SpriteMD isn't really a drawback,
but an advantage.  It has many, many functions.  This
could be just a little bewildering to the first-time
game or graphics programmer.

If you would like to learn a bit about using sprites
and writing games before jumping into SpriteMD, you
might want to try the new DLL, LBsprite.DLL.  It is
NOT a powerful, complete game engine.  It just makes
it fast and easy to draw sprites on the screen.  It only
has a few, simple function calls.  This DLL is a good
way to learn some of the basics of sprite animation.

Instead of making many calls to GDI to place a sprite
on the screen, here is a sample function call from
LBspite.DLL:

CallDll #lbs, "DrawSprite",_   'call the function
    hWnd as short,_        'graphicbox handle
    hBmp as short,_        'bitmap handle
    x as short,_           'x location of sprite
    y as short,_           'y location of sprite
    r as short             'returns nonzero if successful

Be sure to read the textfile that is included with the
DLL and try out the sample programs. To get it, please 
go to Alyce's Restaurant:  http://alyce.webjump.com/

Please send comments about LBsprite.DLL to me at:
awatson@wctc.net

Thanks very, very much!
Alyce
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 Newsletter compiled and edited by: Brosco and Alyce.
 Comments, requests or corrections: Hit 'REPLY' now!
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