New PowerBASIC Site

[Gary Beene]

I've mentioned my site in several of my posts, but after several months of effort I'm ready to post an official "Open" sign.

My site is "Gary Beene's Information Center", at http://www.garybeene.com

The new PowerBASIC (PBWin9) section has over 150 pages of content - examples, source code, links, advice, software reviews, and a large 100+ page tutorial.

I'd say the site is best suited for beginners, or for programmers (new or experienced) who are adding PowerBASIC to their list of skills.

I have plans to add significantly more content so I welcome suggestions on making it more useful to PowerBASIC programmers.

[Elias Montoya]

I made a stereogram program for PBWIN years ago. Curious i found this in your site.

[Gary Beene]

This is an amazing coincidence. And here I am years later meeting up with you on the PB site.

Which of the ones I listed was yours? I put author names by the ones I could identify, but I don't see your name.

[Elias Montoya]

Sorry, i didnt mean i found my stereograms in your website.
I meant curious i found stereograms when i was just looking around.

I like stereograms, but i noticed some of the stereograms in your website
are backwards, for some of them you have to focus beyond the stereogram
and for some you have to focus between you and the stereogram. I can see
them in 1 second.

I liked the animated ones, i think its a pendulum and a rotating.... thing.

[Gary Beene]

Actually, one of the reasons I started looking at PowerBASIC was that I wanted to create animated stereograms. With VB6, the frame rate was too slow, even adding some API content. I had done some reviews of uCalc, which was written in PowerBASIC, and since it did so well I thought I'd give PB a try myself.

I hope to start converting my VB6 stereogram apps to PB this month. I'll do the text one first.

[Eros Olmi]

Also thinBasic is 99% written in PB

Great site Gary. Full of info, details and passion !

I just do not agree on your "BASIC Dialects" list but this is a personal idea.
More or less it seems to follow Tiobe index method that uses search engines results to index languages but we all know how many, many fake sites are out there that only list everything just to show google ads. For example, in the case of thinBasic, 95% of Google returned pages are to be ignored (in the best case) because fake sites. And the same is for many other programming languages.
So, I do not agree in that method. Google can be a great source of info but not the right way to classify a programming language as you stated into "Notes on Google Search Results"

Ciao and thanks for your great site.
Eros

[Patrick Harvey]

broken web page

broken page:

http://www.garybeene.com/sf/books.htm

site looks good....

[John R. Heathcote]

Gary,

Good site.

Couple of 3D things you may want to include that I have gleaned over the years.

Be careful when calculating an angle between two vectors using the dot product. Some other source code snippets I've seen normalize both vectors for this purpose. While this works on paper you can generate inaccurate results when the COS of your angle approaches 0 or 1 due to floating point round off.

Gimbal lock can occur with rotation matricies. While it is possible to overcome this phenomenon using matricies you have to keep track of the individual rotations of each axis. A better solution (so I've been told) for rotating an object in 3D is through the use of quaternions.

[Gary Beene]

Patrick,
Thanks for the broken link comment. I took care of it.

John,
I appreciate the feedback. I'll make a note to incorporate your comments on my next update.

Gary