DarkBASIC Professional

Now, that scentance could be a double edged sword, it could meen I am incompetent, or it could meen there is something wrong with darkbasic pro. What I like to think is that dark basic pro has thoroughly flawed documentation. Just as Peter Patterson said in his review. The programing lanuguage is great and very easily allows you to write software very fast, yet, when you are stuck, the manuals are no help.

Many of the commands do not work as predicted, and same functions seem to be implemented differently for different commands. The 3D rotation commands can drive you nuts. The coordinates system also seems to be a bit unpredictable.

I love the programing language, and that is why I gave it four stars, but they realy need to work on the documentation and help files.

I heard there is an update, hope the documentation update is up to expectations.

I have been using DarkBasic now for several months, and while I was initially as enthusiastic as most of the other reviewers, I have run into enough problems that only become apparent when you try to go beyond the basics that I feel compelled to submit a more balanced review.

For example.. while one review mentions the built in help system that has a brief description of each command, what they failed to mention was that this brief description is the only description of the commands available at all even in the printed manual. The printed docs and the online docs are one and the same, and they are not only brief, but provide circular definitions in many cases, and they are definitely not comprehensive descriptions of what each command does.

The reviewer also mentioned the extensive examples, but failed to point out that the examples are lumped into several huge programs that do nothing meaningful except to demonstrate one particular way to use each command and do nothing to help you figure out how to use each command in all possible ways. Again.. there is no comprehensive reference to all of the commands the language provides.

The online help forums are indeed helpful, but more to the point you will almost certainly have to go there to find out how to use the language. Sufficient information and examples are not provided in the box to use this language on your own, even if you are a professional developer.

Familiarity with Direct X will only help out so far. While DarkBasic Pro is really a thin wrapper for accessing the underlying functionality of Direct X, most of the familiar Direct X terminology has been hidden and replaced with new terminology that is never explained leaving you guessing and experimenting just to find out how a command is supposed to work.

Updates for the program are also few and far between. There are many bugs in the various commands that make entire sets of functionality impractical to use, and many of the DarkBasic forum members have games they would like to ship, but cannot do so until and unless updates are provided to make functionality that is advertised as being in the product already work.

Word is that there may be an update sometime around the fall, but if you are used to using other development tools and getting frequent patches, give some thought to how this kind of infrequent update policy will impact your schedule. You should also check out their online forums and make sure that the features you think will make your development cycle go smoothly work as advertised. Some of the documented commands have actually been removed from the language, although they are still listed as valid commands and provide no indication that they have been disabled when you try to use them (other than simply not working).

My feelings about this product are not entirely negative. It is a very useful tool for rapid prototyping of 3D experiences, and it's a great way to explore Direct X concepts. As the teacher who wrote an earlier review said, it allows you to focus on the game aspects without worrying about the low level details, and it is also very cost effective.

There is also an SDK that allows you to expand the language by writing a DLL in C++, and there are many such free and inexpensive third party DLL's to expand the language beyond the basics.

But it falls short as a professional development tool primarily in the areas of documentation and simply working completely as advertised. You would probably find that you can get your idea implemented halfway five times faster than in some other game engine, but you might also find that after getting halfway there, something doesn't work and you need to spend a lot of time trying to come up with a workaround or having to redesign things using different commands.

In short.. if you just want to experiment with and learn about 3D, this product is perfectly suitable. If you want to use it to develop a professional game, or you want something that just works out of the box and doesn't require a lot of guesswork and experimentation, you may end up dissapointed.

Things that my graduate students used to take a semester to write for research projects are now accessible with a simple command in this language. For example: Binary Space Partion Trees, Surround Sound, Forced Feed Joystick support, A multitude of camera manipulation capabilities, collision detection, model loading and animation, forward kinematics, toon shading, real time shadows, and the list goes on and on... I've even written code to enable stereoscopic rendering so that I can take the output of a dual-headed graphics card, feed it into 2 DLP projectors with polarizing filters. Now my students can write games in true stereoscopic 3D! I know I am not allowed to post web sites in a review, so if you want more info on how to do something like this do a google on geowall darkbasic.

The interesting thing about providing students with so much capability at their finger tips is that they tend to take it all for granted. My students were complaining that the system had this bug or that bug. The hot-shot students wanted to do the class project in C++ and OpenGL instead. So as an experiment, a few of them took an undergrad research class with me the following semester to try and rewrite the game that they had written in DarkBASIC Pro, in C++ and DirectX. A month later I asked them, "next year, when I teach the class again, should I use DarkBASIC or should I use DirectX and C++?" They all said DarkBASIC was the way to go. New students would be too bogged down on the tiny details to be able to understand the whole game development process in a semester. DarkBASIC Pro frees you to think about developing the graphics, the game play, the sound effects- not waste all your time hunting down pointer errors.

Also a great low cost modeling package to go with this is Milkshape. The DarkBASICPro website recommends 3D Canvas. All my students hated 3D Canvas. It was crashing all the time, had an unintuitive interface and created a kzillion windows registry entries making it impossible to use for multiple login IDs on a single Windows box. There were also frequent version changes where 3D models were no longer compatible. Very annoying.