The no-media rule has had a lot of discussion and debate before and during the course of the challenge thread, and this information should help to clarify things so that the principle doesn’t need to be repeatedly restated.

The purpose of the no-media rule is twofold:

Firstly, it is to place the emphasis of the challenges on the coding technique used, rather than the quality of the media you have available. This doesn’t necessarily mean presentation is unimportant, and in certain challenges, the biggest challenge faced by the programmer may well be that of creating a well presented program without external media.

Secondly, it is to enable other people to try out your code as quickly and easily as possible. By having no media, testing someone’s code is as simple as copy-paste-execute. Having to download and unzip file attachments, organise into a folder, copy and paste the code into the IDE, save as a project, etc. etc. is far too tedious for lazy people like me who just don’t have the patience!

So - what is allowed, and what isn’t?

NOT ALLOWED:

You may not enter code that requires anything that must be downloaded, in order for the code to work, including:

• Picture files, like .jpg’s, .bmp’s, .png’s., if they have to be downloaded. 
• .dll’s which cannot be guaranteed to exist on other users’ machines. For example, you may not enter code which requires Sparky’s Collision dll, as not everybody has it installed. 

You may not do anything which attempts to ‘get around’ the rules. An example of this would be converting a media file, such as a .jpg, into a huge stream of data, and pasting it as data statements into your code. This is still classed as media.

ALLOWED:

You may use your skill to write code which creates it’s own media. By using, for example, the 2-d drawing commands and the ‘get image’ command, you can easily produce textures for sprites and objects. Or by using the memblock commands, you could write a program which creates it’s own sounds.

You may use plugins which are certain to exist on all users’ machines, such as the Advanced Terrain plugin.

You may use a command which calls a dll which is certain to exist on every user’s machine, such as win32.dll. This does not require downloading, and therefore is not classed as downloaded media.

You may create pictures within Dbpro, and have your code save them as picture files, and load them back again (to be used as an advanced terrain texture, for example), so long as your code does all this with one single execution.

You may, if you are clever enough, use commands which capture images from the users’ machine, such as the desktop, and use it as media.

You may use data statements in your code to assist in the creation of media, so long as it is data you have produced yourself, rather than copied/converted from existing media files. 

You may write your own separate editor which creates media data to be used in your entry, and paste the data into your entry as data statements, so long as the editor is posted along with your entry, and no external media is used in your editor. For example, you may create an editor which enables you to draw a line drawing of a house using the mouse, and save it as a series of coordinate data. You could then paste the data into your entry as data statements and have the code for your main entry read the coordinate data in order to recreate the house. 

Clear as mud. ;)