How do you draw a Christmas tree and presents in qBasic?

Answer 1

Drawing natural looking trees in any programming language is difficult. The problem is trees (and many other living things) grow in a fractal manner, so look up "fractal mathematics" for ideas. If you don't want to do this research, then you can draw one on paper as you think it should look and hand code the program to exactly duplicate your paper drawing (but when I tried this in the early 1980s it came out looking worse than "a Charlie Brown Christmas Tree").

As to presents and decorations, they are quite trivial as they are almost always regular geometric shapes.

Just remember to have at least some of the lights flashing on and off and have Santa Claus in his Sleigh with all his Reindeer do a flyby in the background! These are all simple animations and much easier than coding a natural looking tree.

In my case back in the early 1980s I approximated a simple "step, scale, and repeat" type fractal to create the branches using some special graphics operations in the special purpose graphics programming language that I was using that qBasic does not have (although you could implement something like them with several subroutines that your main program would call). Although it still wasn't perfect it did produce a feel of a natural looking tree without requiring any really complicated code. I won the "Most Original Tree" prize at work that year and the next year was asked to rewrite it slightly (without animations) so it could be photographed for the Company Christmas Card!