Just a few days ago, I had the misfortune of having to fill up my tractor's fuel tank from being almost empty.  400 gallons @ almost $5.00 per gallon...  And then a sinking feeling hit the core of my gut as I realized I was going to have to repeat such an experience dozens of times this year.  /cry

By the time this harvest season comes around in fall, I'm predicting that we're going to see increases in the price of staple foods by everything doubling, if not more at that time!

"And how's this ever rising inflating relate to QB64 and its development?", you guys ask.

It's all because I realize the Devs are people too!  They're going to be facing the exact same financial crunch as everybody else in the world, and QB64 is nothing more than a hobby project.  Who's going to have time to spend on hobbies, when they're working their ass off just to try and keep food on the table?!!

So, that's when an idea came to me that sounds like a Win-Win for everyone involved:  A QB64 Bounty List!

Got some extra cash laying around?  Are you, like me, one of those whose prepared no matter what the future brings?  I've had a lifetime to save and put aside for hard times, so I can comfortably coast through the next several years of my life and weather the increasing inflation.  Others aren't as fortunate -- such as some student struggling to make ends meet while working their way through college.  They might have skills to work on QB64 in places which I don't, but they simply don't have time to devote to working on things due to having to take a part-time job at McDonalds just to keep the bills paid.

So here's my proposal -- A "Bounty System", where people can pledge to donate $$$ for whatever fix, enhancement, or addition they wish to see for the QB64 language.  It'll give Devs a little extra cash for small projects, keep the development of QB64 going, and gives the user-base a chance to help guide what/where the language should go next.  It's a win-win for everyone!

To start us out, I'd like to place a bounty on the following issues:

1) $100 Bounty for a fix to each of the input commands we use.  As they currently exist, each of them is flawed in various ways.  For instance here's one to illustrate the problem with _KEYHIT:

DO
    k = _KEYHIT
    IF k <> 0 THEN PRINT k
    _LIMIT 30
LOOP

Run the above in the IDE, and hold down CTRL and press TAB.  The Tab key is a keycode 9 key.  When it goes down, it should print 9, when it comes up, it should print -9.  Instead, what we see is:  NO keycode for the down press.  Nada.  Zip.  QB64 simply does not report that tab key being depressed at all.  For the key release, it reports a value of -105 -- which is the I key!   CTRL-TAB is *both* unmapped AND mismapped. and it's an excellent example of the problem the command has.

I'll pay $100.00 to whoever wants to go in and fix _KEYHIT so that it maps all the possible keystrokes correctly -- for both up and down states, in the various operating systems we compile to.  I'll also offer $100.00 for the exact same fix to INKEY$ and _DEVICES, making a total of $300 for the three commands to be repaired fully.  From my memory, Inkey$ does the same mismapping of values and _DEVICES is completely screwed up with codes being nothing as they should be to maintain backwards compatibility  with older versions of QB64 (prior to version 1.0 when the glitch was introduced), and it doesn't read various keys at all.

2)  I'll also offer a $100.00 bounty for whomever wants to go in and fix our fonts for us.  The issue here is with various fonts being cut-off and not rendering properly.  I don't have an example ready at the top of my hand, but I'll dig one up of someone wants to tackle the issue.  Basically, with various fonts, letters get truncated off.  The bottom of the "g" might lose several pixels, or the top of an embellished T is completely cut off...   Fix that, earn $100.00

3) I'll also offer another $25.00 bounty for whomever wants to go in and fix our _LOADIMAGE command.  At the moment, it's impossible to load 256-color images -- they automatically convert over to 32-bit images.  It'd be nice for loadimage to work fully like its supposed to.  I think this should be a small fix (as we apparently load the image first and then convert them to 32-bit somewhere automatically), so it's a smaller bounty.

That's all my poor wallet can afford to place a bounty on at the moment, and as for me personally, I'm rather content with what QB64 can already do for me.  I'm not really pushing for any sort of "future development"  (besides a desire for someone to import a video playback library for us via a _LOADVIDEO command, or for someone to fully integrate a text-to-speech system for us), but I encourage any with a little extra cash to post their own "bounties" here for the Devs to look over and work on. 

QB64 is free.  Users don't pay anything for it; yet there's always a large list of things which people want added to it.  I see nothing wrong with offering a few $$$ towards enhancing or promoting development of the project.  The more people who are willing to donate and place bounties on things, the more Devs can treat QB64 as more than just an occasional hobby-project.

Is there anyone else out there willing to donate for a "fix" to something that's been bugging them?  Or willing to donate to have a feature added you've been dying for?  Is there anyone willing to pick up these Bounties and earn a little extra cash on the side, while helping the language grow and expand over time?

I guess only time will tell!

A brief example of what's going wrong with the CONST issue that bplus pointed out in the other topic:


Without any sort of forced type specified for &H, shouldn't the value always be unsigned?  What's with this deal of it giving signed byte, then signed integer, then signed long, then signed integer64 results?  If you look close &HFFFF is the exact same value as &HFFFFFFFF -- that can't be right!  Can it??

If this is working as intended for &H values, can someone write us up an explanation to document this behavior?  The variable type that we're assigning values to doesn't change from start to finish above, but the values we get from our &H numbers certainly jumps from one extreme to the other.

I just can't sort out why &HFFFF would become 18-quad-zillion-and-2, rather than a simple 65535.

I turned the powershell stuff into a simple little library for people to make use of in their projects, and here it is: 


 

As you can see, all the commands are preceeded by "Speech_", to try and help keep the sub names unique, associative, and not interfere with any user variable names and such.

Routines in this little package are:

Speech_IoR -- Init or Reset.  Call this first to initialize the settings (and turn volume up to 100, or else you'll be speaking on a MUTE channel)

Speech_Speaker -- Change the default speaker.  Currently I only support "David" and "Ziva", but feel free to change or add to this if your system has other voices installed via language/voice packs.

Speech_Speed -- Set a value from -10 to 10 to adjust the speed of the speaker.  0 id default, -10 is sloooow, and 10 is faaaast.

Speech_Volume -- Set a value from 0 to 100 to adjust how loud you're going to be speaking with the voices.

Speech_OutTo -- Use this to change where you want the speech to go.  Only options now are your speakers or a file.  Since it's not currently in the demo, as I didn't want to randomly save junk to folks drives, an example looks like:

        Speech_OutTo "MyTextToFile.wav"
        Speech_OutTo "Speaker"
        Speech_OutTo "" 'defaults/resets to speaker

Speech_Say -- Just says the text you specify with the settings you gave it previously.

Speech_SaP -- Says and Prints the text you specify to the screen as a quick print and speak shortcut.  Uses previous settings.

Speech_ToWav -- Converts text to a wav file and saves it to the disk where you specify.  Since it's not in the short demo above, usage would be as:

       Speech_ToWav "Hello World.  This is the text I'm saving to a file!", "MyFile.wav"

speak -- This is the master command with all the options built into it.  You can skip everything else, if you want to use this as a stand alone command to do everything all at once.  Everything else ends up calling this command at the end of the day, so you can bypass some processes if you call this directly.

---

And that's basically it for now.  Windows Speech Synthesizer is quite a powerful little tool, with a ton of options which we can utilize with it, but I figure this is the basics of what someone would need to be able to do with it for a program.  It seems to handle what I need from it for now.

If you guys need it to do more, feel free to ask and I'll see about adding extra functionality as people need it.  Or, feel free to make the changes necessary yourself and then share them here with us so everybody else can enjoy any extra tweaks you guys add into the code.

---

To make use of this:

1) Download the library: 
2) Move it to your QB64 folder.
3) '$INCLUDE:'TextToSpeech.BM' at the end of your program.
4) Speech_IoR inside your code to initialize everything
5) Call the other subs as you want to make use of them and alter the settings to your specific needs.

It's that simple!  ;D

For everyone who likes to add little tidbits of sound and such to their programs, I thought I'd share this little website for you guys:  https://evolution.voxeo.com/library/audio/prompts/

It's a collection of pre-recorded, royalty-free, open-license sound files which cover a whole lot of the things which I personally tend to make use of in various programs.  Letters, numbers, dates, currency, math, ect...   

With these, I've written spelling programs for children before, which toss an image of something onto the screen and then ask the child to Spell It!  (Example, a picture of a CAT appears on screen.)  If right, it praises the child.  If wrong, the program then goes on to specify.  "C"... "A"... "T"...   "This is a" "C"... "A"... "T"...  <pause for 2 seconds>...  "C"... "A"... "T"...   

Clocks can tell time with these (as illustrated above).  You can have currency amounts read out to you.  You can set up a calculator to read things back to you...   Lots of small little plug-in uses, and honestly, I think everyone should have this little archive somewhere on their computer. 

Only one issue which I've found with it -- and it's not with it, in particular, but with QB64 -- and that's with the fact that these are WAV files which we *should* be able to work with, but we can't.  You'll need to convert them to OGG or MP3 to fully make use of them in QB64 projects, but there's a ton of tools available out there to do so.  (Hint... Hint... VLC can convert file formats, last time I checked, and it's free, and almost everyone has a copy of it already...)

---

EDIT:  For those folks who can't be bothered to convert files as needed, I went ahead and did so here for everyone:   [ You are not allowed to view this attachment ]  

Note that I left the original WAV files in the archive as well, so if you end up deciding you don't need those, that'll reduce the size of your resource files by half.  (From 4 MB to 2... Woooo!!!   If 2 MB storage is an issue for you on modern systems, you need an upgrade! :P )

@bplus and several other folks all like playing around with graphics a lot, so I thought I'd have a little fun and write a simple little graphic program to see who can sort out how the magic here works.

Here's the program:
What this does is draw a simple little pattern on the screen for us, and then the DO...LOOP flips that pattern repeatedly from bottom to top, basically mirroring it for us.

And yet...

Something *magical* happens with this simple little patch of mirror code!!

Who wants to explain how it's doing what it's doing here?  I'm not giving any hints, and I encourage folks not to read anyone else's responses until they have a chance to try this out and see if they can sort out what's happening here on their own.

  [ You are not allowed to view this attachment ]  

Just something I was playing around with, which I thought about adding to my little X-Mas program for folks who like to save their colored pictures and stuff -- a digital style "signature" which I'd post down in the corner of the page as a sort of little watermark for them. 


  [ You are not allowed to view this attachment ]  

A pretty little scribble unique for each user!  ;)

Declare Library ".\falcon"
    Sub uprint_extra (ByVal x&, Byval y&, Byval chars%&, Byval length%&, Byval kern&, Byval do_render&, txt_width&, Byval charpos%&, charcount&, Byval colour~&, Byval max_width&)
    Function uprint (ByVal x&, Byval y&, chars$, Byval txt_len&, Byval colour~&, Byval max_width&)
    Function uprintwidth (chars$, Byval txt_len&, Byval max_width&)
    Function uheight& ()
    Function uspacing& ()
    Function uascension& ()
End Declare

Simpy toss falcon.h into your QB64 folder, and download a fresh copy of the repo, and compile the above.  What I'm getting is the following set of error messages:

C:\Users\the_r\AppData\Local\Temp\ccjqRJ4V.o:qbx.cpp:(.text+0x838): undefined reference to `FT_Get_Char_Index'
C:\Users\the_r\AppData\Local\Temp\ccjqRJ4V.o:qbx.cpp:(.text+0x86c): undefined reference to `FT_Get_Kerning'
C:\Users\the_r\AppData\Local\Temp\ccjqRJ4V.o:qbx.cpp:(.text+0x88e): undefined reference to `FT_Load_Glyph'
C:\Users\the_r\AppData\Local\Temp\ccjqRJ4V.o:qbx.cpp:(.text+0x8b0): undefined reference to `FT_Render_Glyph'
C:\Users\the_r\AppData\Local\Temp\ccjqRJ4V.o:qbx.cpp:(.rdata$.refptr.fonts[.refptr.fonts]+0x0): undefined reference to `fonts'
collect2.exe: error: ld returned 1 exit status

It looks as if QB64 is now trying to get our Temp system folder and work with things from there, but it's failing to do so.  Is someone pushing changes to move the qb64 temp folders into the system Temp folders?  If they are, it appears as if they've missed a few links or some such somewhere.