Final Project

[Baseball435]

Hey everyone, well im currently taking a computer programming class for school and we learn visual basic the whole year. Midterms just ended and my teachers told us to start thinking about a project as our final. Most kids are doing games (simple 2d ones) and I might head down that road. But all I need is just some ideas and it doesn't have to be a game. I'll take all ideas into consideration! Thanks guys!

~baseball435

[Jackolantern]

Where are you at in the language? What is the most complicated thing you have done so far?

[Baseball435]

Hmm well we have learned for loops, I made an Animation game with that. We learned simple oop. Umm idk what the hardest thing was. We know basics and then more. Like string manipulation etc. I just need some ideas

[Callan S.]

Do a mario game, but you play as the blocks (mario uses AI) and you have to press a button to move just at the right time to make mario fall to his doom!

[SpiritWebb]

Do a mario game, but you play as the blocks (mario uses AI) and you have to press a button to move just at the right time to make mario fall to his doom!

LOL!

[Jackolantern]

Honestly I believe your classmates are backing themselves into a corner by choosing a game. Game development is extremely difficult if you are starting with just the base language. Physics programming for even a simple platformer game can be tough without the math concepts and knowing exactly how to apply them.

I honestly think you should seize this chance. Your classmates are going to show up on the due date with buggy, half-complete, disorganized, hacked-together games unless they are already doing game programming in their own time. I think you should set your goals a bit lower, and instead deliver a well-organized, bug-free utility application. I bet your instructor will be pleasantly surprised. Perhaps think about a word processor application with full formatting, printing, saving, etc, or something along those lines.

[Baseball435]

Do you mean like spell checking and grammar and stuff? That would be cool but I would have to think about how to make it

[Jackolantern]

I wouldn't worry about spell checked unless you can find a component with all of the words in the dictionary to work with. Grammer check is out for sure unless you can find a class that does all the work for you, because Word's grammer check is extremely complicated and it still doesn't work all that well. Grammer check is so complex that even OpenOffice does not have it. Spell check on the other hand is possible if you can just get all the words to work with.

Some of the features to have would be bold, italics, text center, left, right and if you want a challenge, justify. You will need to make sure you have tabs working correctly, and not changing fields which is the default VB form behavior. Save to both plain text and your own file format. While the latter sounds tough, it is not too bad. You just save the file with your own file extension and add text to it with "mark-up" in it to keep track of the text centering, bold, italics, justify, etc. You will need to have logic to parse and display these files correctly so people can re-open their files and keep working with them, too.

I think you get the idea. There is actually a lot of work in there to do to have even 5% of the features of word, but even that would be a great Programming 1 project. Even if you don't make this one, this should give you a good idea of the kinds of things you could choose from. It doesn't have to be revolutionary. Just make a small version of a program you use all the time.

[PaxBritannia]

I agree with Jack, making a game is too typical, and you have to spend time thinking of the game mechanics and physics simulation.

Work processing... Great idea! Personally I love the idea of saving documents with your own extension and then opening them again.

Maybe try an encryption program? Or a password manager which encrypts usernames, passwords, and login urls into a file (using hash methods) which you can then carry around and then open on another computer?

Try and think of something that you could actually use.

pax.

[Baseball435]

I talked to my teacher and he said that it would be an okay project but not the best because some of those functions are like one line of code and easy to implement. I think he wants like a more complex but not too complex project. Idk how to explain it