I started out with DarkBASIC Classic in 2000. It was me and a friend who pooled our collective money to order it and we had tons of small projects that we never finished. Unfortunately, a severe hard drive crash killed every byte there was from those projects. But I learned so much making those things that I guess the memories are enough, anyway. Hehe.
Later, I moved on to DBP, then to work professionally in the game industry as a Gameplay Designer and today, well, after trying to work with the GDK for some time to get my spare-time game making fix, I've just had to realize that it doesn't cut it.
Haven't shared much work with the community and I haven't been very active, but I've lurked in the background for all these ten years, reading the extremely useful and helpful posts that can be found all over the place. It's a great community and a great place to start if you want to make games.
But one tip I'd like to give everyone who's starting out: don't fool yourself. DBP/GDK aren't the be all and end all of amateur game development. In fact, throughout these ten years, TGC has been consistently terrible at updating their software, fixing bugs and at support in general.
There's a lot of potential in DBP, the GDK and probably in FPSC as well. But they've never been and probably will never be complete products.
The GDK is the most recent turnoff, for me.
To test the things I wanted, I needed the following plugins:
Sparky's Collision
DarkPHYSICS
DarkNET
Enhanced Animation
EZrotate
That's five plugins, each (except one) adding additional cost to the price. Now, a price of free is arguably OK, but considering I've bought five tons of software from TGC through the years, it doesn\'t quite count.
Now, the plugins are excellent, most definitely. But they only go to show that the GDK (and DBP) don't function as well as advertised. And that's after ten (or more) years in the making
So, anyway, good luck to all of you, and say hi to Van B for me when he locks this thread.
