Data, Data, and more Data

I decided pretty early on that I wanted a dynamic racing form. Now if you don’t know what a racing form is – it’s the bible (no sacrilege intended) of every horse race handicapper. The racing form tells you, for each horse running that day, what his recent history is race-by-race. I mean it tells you stuff like how far he was back from the leader at the 3 furlong pole (a furlong = 1/8 mile), what gate he started out of, what the winning time of that race was, how fast he was in his last 3 practices. And much, much more.

I wanted that!

So my simulation had to capture all that information in real time (now do you see why I needed more speed in my graphics engine?). By the way, programmers call lots of things “engines”. When they say engine all they really mean is a function, or more rather a set of functions, that perform a given task. So I could say that I wrote a “racing form engine”, or a race horse “behaviors engine”. Just means I wrote some code that does that. You have to admit that “engine” sounds pretty cool though, huh?

OK. Now I need to really understand databases. After a lot of reading and , yes, trial & error, I realized that by far the easiest way to implement a database is to use MS Access to create the database, and then connect to it with VB6 using what is referred to as Jet 3.57 or whatever the current version is. It’s integrated right in the VB6 IDE. Really wish I could tell you what an IDE is, but the best I can come up with right now is “something Development Environment”. Maybe “Integrated”, now that I think about it…

Anyhoo, what an IDE is, is a tool that helps you write code. The VB6 IDE knows the VB6 language and provides TONS of help in programming. You can actually write Visual Basic code in Notepad if you want. It’s just like writing HTML – you don’t need Dreamweaver to write HTML or CSS, but BOY is it easier with it.

I’m easily distracted, as you can see. But I hope there’s some value to you in my little forays into the netherworld.

A lot of people hear “database” and think “omigosh – forget it”. But I’m here to tell you- this stuff is EASY. Don’t be intimidated! Creating a database in Access is a cakewalk. It’s very WSIWYG. Create a new database and name it something that is concise – your table names will be more descriptive. Then add a table to collect your data. For my project I named the dbase- that’s slang for database {:<) - “rftr.mdb”. Those are the initials of my project. My primary table was named tblHistory. The “tbl” part tells me it’s a table, and the “History” part tells me what it will contain.

Then I added fields such as horseName, jockeyName, raceLength, winningHorse, winningTime, etc.

You may notice that I use a certain pattern in naming things – there’s a name for this approach, but as usual I have no idea what that is. Basically you start with a lowercase descriptor of the object, and then capitalize each word that comes after that. You might have something called tblWinningHorsesName. I have found, through years of use, that this approach is the easiest for me to read and understand. In programming you will be creating hundreds or thousands of objects. It makes life a lot simpler in a large program to start each object’s name with a description of what it is (ie, “tbl”) and then use this means of differentiating words within the name. By the way, you typically can’t use spaces and a number of other characters in your names. Some people use underscores, but it’s just too hard for me to type “tbl_winning_horses_name”.

Once all the fields are set up, which includes defining what kind of data they will hold, such as text, numbers, dates, etc., then you’re ready to go into VB6 and have your code talk to the database tables and fields you just created.

Really, it’s just collecting data and retrieving data. Access and Jet are the easiest way unless you’re dealing with hundreds of thousands of records, or you have dozens of users that will all be accessing the same dbase concurrently – then Access sucks.

So a couple of months later I had a dbase and the racing form is working - SO COOL!

Viewport Foibles

At that point in development I didn’t have much in the way of graphics. One set of graphics of a horse running – 9 different drawings, as I recall, that gave the impression of smooth animation. Like cartoons, right? But I thought I’d better get a handle on how I was going to get that animation into the viewport.

Maybe I should take a moment to talk about sprites. I learned how they work in 1983 or so when I wrote that little program on the ol’ TI-99/4A. A sprite is simply any graphic that you draw on the screen, then erase it (or re-draw the background over it), move it, and then re-draw it on the background. So it moves. Don’t know where the word “sprite” comes from, but that’s what it’s called. Now, if you want it to look a whole lot cooler you have to animate it – just like cartoonists do.

So you simply create a series of drawings on a transparent background that depict what the sprite is doing. So for my horse I created a small drawing of a horse in mid-stride, then I created another drawing with the horse’s front legs going further forward while the back legs are a little further back – and so on. With 9 “panels” the animation looked pretty convincing.

I’m not an artist, and I don’t think you need to be. If you can look at a picture and copy it in pencil, then you can scan it into a paint program and use the program’s tools to brush color over it. It’s pretty amazing how good it will look with not much effort.

At that stage the program loop wasn’t doing a whole lot of stuff. It checked to make sure the “horse” wasn’t running off the screen, it moved the background graphic sideways a couple of pixels, and checked on a number of other things, like who is in the lead, updating the elapsed time clock, etc.

But the horse animation was too jerky – and I didn’t have the program doing HALF the stuff I wanted it to do. Heck, I was only drawing one horse. I needed to draw 12! So I knew I had to find a faster way of getting the sprites on and off the screen. I started reading up on programming the Windows API (application programming interface). An API is a language that lets you write code that “talks” directly to the underlying technology. In this case that was Windows. I learned everything I needed to in order to draw the graphics directly on the Windows, er, window. By the way, I was using Windows 98 at the time.

Guess what? Still not fast enough… Still too jerky.

I had spent something like 2 months implementing the Windows API solution. Back to the drawing board. So I started reading about DirectX. DirectX8 had just come out but that seemed to be overkill for what I needed. DX8 was all about 3D graphics. I was working with scrolling 2D graphics. So I bought several books about DX7. After many weeks I figured out how to draw the graphics in DirectX7. But now I couldn’t get the viewport to be active at the same time that the dashboard was on screen.

I literally spent 3 or 4 months figuring out that problem. I wrote to I-don’t-know how many forums, read everything I could get my hands on, tried everything I could think of. I can’t tell you how now (I think I’ve blocked it from memory) but I figured out the solution – and it was FAST ENOUGH to provide me smooth horses!

That was, I’d say, the toughest challenge I overcame in my journey to completion. But there were many more to come…

A Little History

So how did I go from Unskilled Geek to polymath?

Coin-op video game freak extraordinaire - Space Invaders, Pac Man, Donkey Kong, Joust. You name it. But that doesn't teach much but eye-hand coordination and how to avoid your responsibilities.

1982 - The Texas Instruments TI-99/4A came out. For about $100 I could buy a "real" computer. Had to hook it up to your TV for a monitor; saved your code on an audio diskette tape; oh yeah - the largest program it could hold in RAM was 16k - yeah, K.

Used TI Basic - bought the "Extended Basic" plug-in module and was able to program SPRITES!

Started with "Hello, World" and a year later finished and copyrighted a sports game that was the EARLY predecessor to the program I started selling last year.

Boy Genius? Not hardly. Learned a little, learned a little more, painstakingly trial and errored. Finally got it where I wanted it. You can do a lot with 16k if that's all you have.

Then life got busy - had 3 kids by then, and a demanding job.

Didn't touch technology (except as a user, of course - I AM a Geek) for 17 years. In 2000 something - can't remember what - brought my attention to Visual Basic. I was in a new job and away from home a LOT. Decided, what the heck, I'll buy VB6 and see if its anything like what I programmed with for the TI-99/4A.

Well it was, and it wasn't.

I mean, it was visual - that was good. Easy to create user interfaces and all. But the language was SO MUCH more complex.

So I read some and tried some - back to "Hello, World" again...

Decided to write a little program to help people decide whether to get a fixed-rate mortgage or an adjustable. You know - asked the user a series of questions about their needs, had some formulas built in there to add weighting to their answers, and spit out a recommendation. Didn't really use it for anything, but I could say "look what I created".

That was a big deal for me. I could create something useable with VB6.

I've always been pretty creative - decently, not exceptionally. But I had discovered that anything I can think up, I can program. Another big deal.

So with a little time on my hands I decided the best way to learn was to start on a most ambitious undertaking - to create a piece of software that would require lots of intricate programming, fast code, tons of graphics and sound - and then sell it.

Stay tuned for how I started a 5 year programming effort with a successful conclusion...