Screw those who say otherwise. Free stuff is always nice. And to the topic of free, I bring FreeBasic. I'm sure its been around, and I'm sure I've heard of it before, but recently I decided to go some place I haven't been for more than a decade. Quickbasic style programming.

Oh but this isn't the basic I used to remember, oh no. Its much more splendid now.

Now I did mention this before, but I had recently come to a wall in development when my latest usb stick drive was untimely killed via children. Lost was updates to Shield Breaker, Black Shadow, and a complete reworking of The Crawl. Those sample shots in previous post of the all new crawl creator interface, all gone.

So with a new direction, I move onto FreeBasic to encode the editor. First few versions and I'm already pleased. I think my favorite part is being able to set the types of variables. Bytes for on and off flags, Shorts for simple coordinates, and so on.

Anyways, theres not much done as far as the editor being made, but the interface is coming together. I've created my own 'object' system, in which you predefine some object parameteres(type, location, tag, flag) for some buttons, labels and check\option boxes.

The program is simple, you move the mouse around, "left" and "right" display when buttons on the mouse are pressed, "Over" or something also appears when you left click over a button or check/option box. The entire window and boarder thickeness is controlled by variables, allowing the window changed to any size, or maginified once I figure out how to enlarge fonts.

The original Crawl Creator for The Crawl should provided a nice template to convert ideas over, plus mixing in some of my redesigns from my lost attempt. So heres a tiny demo, it should only take about 4-5 mb of ram and no CPU.

Sample Interface

Why am I deciding to go with FreeBasic? Becauses there just so happens to be a snazzy Irrlicht wrapper for it that I can't wait to play with.