Well, that's one reason Visual Studio worked well for me, the controls are easy to use... But I don't know if we want to depend on .net stuff so we might want to make custom controls anyway. As for graphics, the start screen won't require anything graphic, really... We'll just want to display bitmaps, load them from skin files and such. Didn't work with System.Drawing much, but I'm guessing it will be enough. Hmmm, now that I think of it, if ships are in 3D we might want to display it on the start screen... We'll see when we get there anyway SVN means Subversion. Basically it's a system that allows many people to work on the same project. For example, I have a folder called 'DCME' on my computer; this is a working copy. The repository is at http://opensvn.csie.org/DCMapEd and contains all the files. When I'm done working on a file on my computer, I commit the changes, and the SVN program will upload the modifications made to the file on the repository. Then if someone else starts to work on something, he'll need to update his working copy by a simple click, and he'll get all the changes made, with a logged comment for every revision made. It's really simple to use... http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/ ;try it out with DCME's repository if you want. You'll need a password to change stuff though, so you can't screw stuff up