Instead of just sharing stuff around the forum, our best work needs to hit the rest of the internet.

What could have been that example was called "Black Annex" - it was even greenlit for Steam, everyone was talking about it - and then...nothing. It seemed like the developer fell off the face of the planet.

That's not entirely true - he was still active on twitter, but never really seemed to answer anything in regards to that game. It seems crazy; he worked long and hard to develop that game, a single man effort over years. He got crazy press about it, and managed to get on Steam and greenlit to go. Then - poof. He stopped talking about it, working on it, I don't know what.

It's one of the strangest things I've ever witnessed on the internet...

All, thank you for your help - I got it sorted, and I feel kinda dumb for why:

1) Greatest issue was that I forgot that by default QB64 compiles to its own directory - but in the IDE there's an option to make it compile to the source's directory. So - what was happening was that it compiled the project, executed it - and the files weren't in the same spot. Switching that compile option on fixed it - at least for my cube demo...

2) But the portals demo was still failing, even with this switched on! I found out that because the folder I had the portals.bas source code in had a portals folder inside (which held the textures for the demo), when it tried to compile portals.bas -> portals (binary), it couldn't - because "portals" was already a directory. This is a limitation of linux; I believe windows (and probably dos) allow you to have both an executable and a folder named identically. So - I changed the name of the folder to "textures", updated the code to point to that folder for the loading routines, recompiled - and it all worked properly!

So - all's good now, and everything ran right. I'm going to go look in the archive section of the forum to see if the portals demo is already around, and if not, I'll upload it for others - it's really a fun little demo (though a bit slow) - I just wish I could remember who created it (if I find the post, then I'll know).

Thanks again everyone!

Whatever happens in regards to Inform - my plea would be to remember to not exclude the other two major operating systems; it seems that so often, a project will start out as being "cross-platform", garnering a lot of support, only later to find itself shutting out everything except Windows (as an original kickstarter supporter for Oculus, their dropping support for Linux really ticked me off, as it was one of the main things that caused me to invest).

Now - I know this dialog is just a clone, and is likely (?) cross compatible and isn't specific to Windows - I'm just putting out a plea and reminder, that there are others out there who use other operating systems besides Windows (and QB64 always being cross-platform in this regard has been a breath of fresh air for so long).

Way, way back when (this was back before OpenGL was fully available in QB64 - I've been away from it for a long while) - I did a bunch of hacking on the IDE - and today when I installed 1.2, I noticed to my chagrin that likely none of my changes were ever incorporated into the main codebase (assuming it is the same stuff from back then).

For instance, one thing I modified was the directory/file listings - it may be a Linux only thing (the only OS I've used QB64 on) - but when you open up the file loader in the IDE, the names of the files and the names of the directories aren't in any real order; not alphabetical, not anything - they are all munged together, with folders randomly interspersed with files, and neither the files nor the folders follow any order.

To say the least, this makes locating a file or directory a big chore.

So back then, I took the code in the IDE and fixed it, so that the directories were at the top of the listing, and the files were below, and both were in alphabetical 0-9A-Z order.

I recall that there were other changes and whatnot I made as well, but I don't recall what they all were. This was all back on the .net site and forum, which is probably all lost (though I probably have a copy of the old IDE code somewhere).

I intend to dig it up - and perhaps revisit those changes, see what I did back then, and what (if anything) I can bring over to the current IDE to fix some of those glaring issues. Then maybe issue a proper pull request or something to the project to include the changes.

Hey guys, it's been ages since I last posted, back on the (I guess?) old .net forum (I've been away so long I don't even know what happened there, etc).

Anyhow, today I needed to run a simple QB program and found my old install (v1.0 - yay) of QB64 wasn't working right (it gave a compile error on even the simplest of code), so I installed the latest version of QB64 (after a lot of trials of issues where I had to modify the g++ command to load missing libs on the command line). Once I got past that, it installed fine.

BTW - I am doing all this on a very customized and munged up version of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS - long in the tooth, and beat to within an inch of it's life - mainly just to keep it up-to-date enough to continue to compile and run stuff (someday, hopefully soon, I'm going to wipe this system and start fresh with something more recent; until then, I work with what I got).

So once I got things installed, I tried to compile a simple program (nothing more than CLS: PRINT "Hello World") - which also failed - had to make a similar mod as before to the command line libraries, to include glibc - something like "-lstdc++" or something like that).

Once that was in place, I could compile the simple hello world test case. So then I jumped into the deep end and decided to try out one of the OpenGL examples - that worked ok. I tried a few other examples - games, old-skool stuff, just various junk for the samples folders. Everything was compiling and working fine.

So then I decided to try one of my old pieces of code. I don't know if any of you were around back in the day or recall - but for a little bit I was playing around with QB64, updating it's IDE to fix some quirks (many of which are still there, btw - sigh) - and this was all prior to OpenGL integration, at least for Linux. So - I took one of my old QB4.5 demos I had, messed around with _MAPTRIANGLE - and came up with a rotating cube demo, and posted it on the (old?) forum.

Actually - I think I may have a copy on my github - yeah, here it is:

https://github.com/andrew-ayers/qb64/tree/master/mt_cube_v2

But when I run it, it throws a "Invalid Handle" error - and I don't know why. So - just so I didn't think I was crazy, I decided to try out this 3D engine code I had found on a thread on the old forum, I don't recall who wrote it (they were a genius tho!) - called "portals" - it was basically a simple "portal style" rendering engine. It does something similar in that it loads up various images for "texture files", then uses that data via the handle it has assigned - for instance, something like:


Where it would die would be in the "_SOURCE handle" part, throwing the "Invalid Handle" error on that line (in my cube demo case, it throws it on the _MAPTRIANGLE line). I thought maybe - at least in the case of the portal engine (because my cube demo explicitly defines the variables properly) - because it didn't define the handle variable as a long, it needed that; so I threw in a "DIM handle AS LONG" - but the error persists.

As far as I can tell, all of this code is written properly, and there shouldn't be any errors. At this point, I don't know if I should suspect my system, my code (or the "portal code"), or QB64 - or some strange combo of "all of the above" as to causing this error.

Again, I note that I had to make modifications to the install script to pass in "-lstdc++ -lm" on the g++ command line in the installer (for QB64 compilation), and I had to do the same within "makeline_lnx.txt" just to get programs to compile and run.

But all the other examples run correctly - including the OpenGL examples (which of all I would expect them first to fail, being the most likely complex?).

So - I know I've written a book here - but does anyone have any idea what the problem could be? Has this been encountered before?

BTW - if a copy of the portal engine is wanted for testing, and it wasn't carried over to this new forum - I can possibly supply it too.

Thank you guy's for any help or insights!

EDIT: I just wanted to post the kind of errors I was getting that made me change the g++ compile options:


They were all similar to the above - again, this happened during the time when I was installing QB64, and then once I updated the command line options and got it installed (and the IDE popped up and ran), then on compiling a simple example, I got similar errors that were only correct by making the same modification.