Lee tell us about your first computer/console you ever owned and what is your first "gaming" memory?

The first console I ever used was a device called 'Inter-Tele', which could run games by inserting a cartridge and playing on pads connected to the device with a springy wire. It was a very cool piece of kit for its time and had such games as tank-battle, sea-battle and racing. All very simple stuff by todays standards, but back then I would play it with my brothers, family and friends over and over. The first game I played on that was racing. Two cars in an overhead view perspective would race around a track and the first over the line would win. A strange sort of game as there was no split screen so which ever car lagged behind would receive a penalty and be transported nearer to the lead car. A cool part of the game was you could wander off the track and through the trees, a great way to see parts of the landscape that you normally would not be allowed to see if you followed the rules. I remember it vividly simply because I played it so much. Games back then relied so much on repeat-play that they where solid as a rock when it came to gameplay.

My first computer was a VIC-20 which came with a built in BASIC language. I programmed it from the very first day, which just happened to be Christmas day. The first program I 'copied' from the manual was something strange and silly to get me into the language. I think it was printing my name on the screen. The first program I could call my own was a text adventure. There was no defined plot as I recall, you simply started in a western town and wandered around to the railway station and the sheriffs office and picked up a few items. No real sense of a game to it, just a proud sense of achievement.

Just like the Amiga, AMOS was what I regarded as a revolution in the world of programming. It gave the user the power of the entire machine through a very simple and intuitive interface. I programmed AmigaBASIC before it and to load a picture was literally three pages of code. In AMOS it was one command. I spent years programming in AMOS, probably longer than I should have. Maybe I would be a better C++ coder if it was not for the ease and strengths of AMOS which had me hooked. I made many games in AMOS, and was the first language that allowed me to write quite good games that managed to make it to the magazines and public domain. Such grand titles as Shoot'Em Baddies, Calculus Combat and Aquakon marked my journey into the world of learning how to write games. My last game was called Relics of Deldroneye, and was my biggest and best achievement on the Amiga. It made more money than all my other games combined, and got some of the best public domain reviews I have ever read. With a little more polish it would have easily made commercial, but alas by that time the Amiga market was all but gone in the UK and the PC started to rule the waves.

I donated my Amiga to my brother, who as I understand put it into the loft and I think it is still there somewhere. I kept my games, art and source code archives for the machine for many years after I stopped using it however in time it became clear that my direction was forwards and I had no need to source such material and so threw much of it away. The Amiga was a great machine and really allowed so much to be created there was no limit. Some of my favourite Amiga games where 'Defenders Of The Crown' which had awesome graphics and a great sense of conquest when you defeated your enemies. Taking over old England was the goal, and I completed it many times. Most of my gaming life was on the Commodore 64, as by the time I had the Amiga my time was largely split between college and writing games. Playing them came secondary as my time was divided mainly into finding new ways of doing an old game idea. 'Lemmings' was also a favourite of mine. 'Super Cars' was also great fun, with the novel idea of buying and using weapons on the race track to put off your opponent, and the comic commentary at the end of the race. Very inventive stuff!

I left Wigan Business School at the age of 22 and went working for Europress Software. It was my first job interview and got the job on the spot. They wanted someone to write small multimedia applications and games, and my CV was full of games I had single handedly written so they cast me in a good light. I first worked on the Klik\Click series of products and produced all sorts of little goodies including such games as 'Zeb' and 'Lobotomy' with much help from a very talented graphics artist. It was a good team. He would think up the game graphics and I would make them do stuff. I also worked on other Europress products from time to time. After a few years Europress contracted me out to work for Lego for a year or so where I joined a team to write the programming language for the ' Lego Mindstorms' series. After that, I decided not to return to honest employment and go self-employed to see what would happen.

The very first seed of the idea of a scripting language for games was planted by Rick in my last year. At the time I remember I was writing a game called 'Pontoon' which I recall did not get used anywhere. It was quite a good game too! At the time I continued my own thing, learning DirectX and C++. It took months just to get a triangle on the screen with the camera moving around it. I was so proud. I later wrote a game from what I had learned called Pobs which was a command and conquer clone with goo-people and goo-buildings. I would say this game was the start of DB development.

I recall a conversation I had with Malcolm, my uncle, which started to pour some serious thought into the idea of a game language for the PC. I had the skills to get all the music, sound and graphics doing their thing, so why not add a script around it all. We then set to work, with Malc writing the parser and myself writing and cleaning up the game code for the language. Alas my impatience got the better of me and I wrote a quick parser as a test to see the kind of speeds my language could produce. This little parser grew in size until it overtook Malcs efforts in the same field. We agreed to use the new parser and continue from there, which is of course another story. It was not long before the language was behaving itself and producing very cool things. Nothing quite like it on the PC too which meant I could probably sell it. Up until it being nearly complete I had not thought too much about selling it, as I was gainfully employed. Around the time I finished Lego, I decided I could start selling it and go self-employed. It was crazy but it worked.

There are so many now that I can hardly keep up. My time has been so focused on my daily tasks that I hardly have time to look up and smell the roses. The screenshots on the main DarkBASIC page speak of great productions that look and play great and are sure to help the careers of the authors in many different ways. I have been impressed with the dedication of the author of the game 'StarWraith' who has produced a trilogy of the game and manages his website and sales as a lonewolf developer. This kind of approach to making a name for yourself is something I can identify with right away.

A complete collision and physics system to do away once and for all the issues of collision handling. It should be as automatic as switching on a light. At the moment the best you can get is sphere to polygon detection. Used for most game systems but not all, and I want to offer every kind of functionality. I want to add support tools to DBPro too. I think the language is complete enough to produce almost anything now, but users still need world, level, model, animation, sound, music and texture editors to make game creation an all round easy process. At the moment it is a little fragmented and I want to pull in these threads. There are other issues such as the lack of specific features but it seems the community is way ahead of me already in terms of providing menu, windows, mmorpg, port and device command sets through our third party commands SDK. I have heard nothing but good things from the developers who are using TPC SDK to enhance DBPro, and I am glad I made it a priority to implement and document this feature of the language.

I have so many pearls I could weigh a ship down with them. It is what happens to you when you program for over a decade. I am in the process of writing snippets every time one of those pearls are required, and collecting useful responses for an FAQ we are also working on. I figure the best advice I can give is the day to day advice as and when people face those brick walls common in computer programming. The heaviest pearl I can think of at the moment is patience and time. You are not going to write the next Vice City in two weeks, no matter how good you think you are. It will take YEARS of dedicated effort to get to that point. The good thing about writing games is that you get to enjoy those YEARS on the road to ultimate success. If success however simply means the production of a game idea you have had, then you are a winner the moment you get something to work. And an extra pearl for those of you just starting out. Eat properly and go to bed at a decent hour. Establish a good daily pattern and do not do as I did which is work like a vampire deep into the night. It might seem like you are gaining, but in truth you are setting up a long term condition that is disruptive and hard to break!

The award this month goes to Ezzers for this fun little "run around a matrix, shooting stuff" game! Random terrains, things to kill and overall it just looks quite nice. Well done!

Also released by the same talented author is the latest version of 3D Map Editor 2.31r2. It is a complete 3D world/scene building package that uses 3D primitives and imported 3D objects to allow for quick and easy map creation. You can add in spheres, cubes, pyramids, objects, light sources, 3D sounds, matrixes, action zones and more into your map. The resulting file is saved in its special file format that you can load into your DarkBASIC programs with the supplied function library. This means very fast and very impressive 3D map creation with the minimum of fuss! 3DMapEditor also uses Frederics Magic Windows system so it's a great showcase of what is possible. Well worth checking out.

We have an exclusive interview with the author Andrew Vanbeck next issue - be sure not to miss it because it's fascinating reading!

Being able to set their resolution is a handy thing, it allows us to create and display foreground information using Psprites, and we never have to worry about re-sizing this information depending on what resolution the player is running your game in. Also you can hard code the sprites positioning, and no matter what resolution, it'll scale the images and positions to render to your virtual Psprites screen res.

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