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Ive been wondering for a while if "the game creators" would ever realease a new version of dark basic.

Honestley its the only programming language i ever knew, and i really liked it. The problem is of course is its a pretty slow and weak engine and many people who program hate basic. Now i cant say i know how compilers work but is the actual dark basic as a non object oriented language the cause of the slowness and weaknes of the DB Engine?

I havent programmed in Dark basic for a few years now, but i am always planning to get back into it sooner or later as i refuse to give up the ambitios project of my youth before real life beats me up and takes them from me lauging at my face. I was always hoping that TGC was working on a more powerful faster version of dark basic while remaining the friendly familiar syntax i loved so much.

It was frustrating to make my programming as efficient as possible to avoid radical FPS drops. Some of this was solved by hardware upgrades, but not by much. (one of the reasons i sortof gave up on dark basic for a while)

So in theory is it possible to have dark basic running on a faster more powerful and efficient engine? If yes then is TGC working on anything like that?

If no, does that mean TGC also gave up on dark basic in exchange moving to more popular, trendy platforms like iphone apps and android tablets?

If thats the case, i can only hope that eventually hardware will become powerful enough and dark basic will still be compatible with it and the limits of speed and power would be removed by powerful hardware.

Or am i just a hopless DB fanboy and i should just suck it up and move to a better engine if i still wanna realize my ambitios projects of my youth.

Have you seen the DarkBASIC Elite thread?


You're not alone here mate. While I don't use it much anymore I always loved programming in DBP, I wrote my first game in it, and would hate to see it die. I think TGC have DarkBASIC on pause for now.

Dark basic elite? The first time ive heard anything about me. I am kindof skeptical about this being regular dark basic pro with a modified compiler. and a bunch of goodies like extra apps and plugins and modelpacks.

But i would still buy it if its significantly improoved in terms of speed and power/efficiency.

Is this a fan project btw? because i cant find any opfficial info on DBP elite. I certainly value the efforts of enthusiasts rather than development companies who are profit motivated for the most part.

Well the market potential is dragging TGC towards the mobile gaming world, more people are interested in developing for these devices, and there are more straightforward systems now for writing high quality PC games. By that, I don't mean DBPro is obtuse - I mean there are options like UDK, Unity, Source - for newcommers, there are more options and they are all a bit more direct. You could load up Unity and have a 3D engine with terrain and objects etc etc in a short space of time - in DBPro on the other hand you have to know your onions to get the same results. It's more appealing to newcommers, to have an integrated 3D world editor and neat menus and systems to do a lot of the hard work for you.

As far as Object Orientated goes though, well going between C++ in Xcode, and DBPro, well the logic code is all the same, I'm still using the same data footprint, same handling - for things like particles and game objects and stuff like that. So there's actually very little difference or benefit with OO in my project. I mean, with videogame programming we need to cut the snobbery, because most videogame programmers won't use OO properly, not unless they are specifically trying to proove something. If I need 512 particles, then that's 512 instances of something, there is no difference between relying on DBPro's object numbers and standard variables (position, rotation etc), and rolling your own as an OO object. The benefits of OO are largely lost when dealing with game projects I think - we need a lot of instances of the same thing, and the rules that common sense dictate, can't be bent very far by OO.

I would say though, DBPro prepares us better for more complex languages than we might think... I'd say it's better to dive right into these things once you know DBPro, because even though it's BASIC, we still end up trying to make our projects efficient, and fast as possible, and invariably that follows the methods used in languages like C++.

nice post van b!

I think DBPro is great. I love having control of my own engine, and granted my engine coding is nowhere near udk or unity... but I made it and I know it inside out and I can add what I want when I want where I want it, and best of all I can do it fast and easily thanks to the basic language.

I think dbpro will be useful as long as it will run on a machine.

there is something very satisfying about sitting down and writing text and that text turning into a whole logic system with a visual game world on the front end.

comes down to what you want to do.

if you want a chisel, use a chisel. if you want a gci guided laser cutter use that, whatever gets the vision completed.

I still see great value in DBPro, and I see a bright future in DBProElite and AGK.

I completley agree. i tried using UDK at one point, Its pretty advanced yes, but all the easy editing stuff will box me in within its easy level limits of editing, Anything more advanced as i found out requires you to modify the engine code which can be frustrating and challenging because you dont know how it works and you dont know the programming language its written with (like me) I think it is possible to build a decent engine in dark basic, with all the basic editing tools. It wont be too advanced but because you wrote the engine, you can work with it much easily than with another engine.

At one point i restarted one of my projects from scratch making a less ambitios game than my previosly abandoned work. the development of the game eventually evolved into a basic, 3d scene editor where i can import terrain models and other models and place them and scale them and stuff. I hit a roadblock and abandoned the project, but now, after reading the forums for a bit, i found several possible solutions, so i want to give it another shot. Also, i am planning to learn how to edit vertexes in DBP in real time for the purpose of creating my own simple terrain editor. I tried several terrain editors before and each one either had troble rendering within dark basic (reflected the surrounding light in extreme levels causing the terrain to turn white, Also it had a very stupid painting system, where the terrain had to be seperated into several random models for the textures to show up properly, Other terrain editors were a pain to convert to .DBO format and most couldnt do large scale terrains. I decided to just screw everything and try top make my own terrain editor in dark basic, but i dont have experience of that stuff. Altho i do have some old DBP code that would be useful in my plans if i could somehow salvage it and make it work with my ideas.

So yeah, my point is, if you want to get stuff done right i guess you gotta do it yourself. I just really hope that the new dark basic Elite is infact powerful enough for me to stop worrying about loosing frames over very basic graphical things. Because i swear, my mashine can run all modern game on full ultra high settings at 100FPS, while in dark basic, adding a dynamic shadow to the object or aplying a simple shader causes the whole thing to drop from 100FPS to 5 FPS. and i dont even like using shaders, but i am sure even without shaders, its hard to make anything look natural without basic shadows.
Or when i try to run tests by loading as many models as i can and see how much can be loaded before FPS starts to drop. looking at the readings and amounts of polygons, Dark basic can load 10% of what my mashine is truly capable of before it starts to slow down significantly. Other games i play have millions of polygons rendering with high res textures and they are fine and dark basic can only load several hundred thousand textureless polygons and it drags after that. Powerful hardware seemes to do no favors for dark basic so far. I am very looking forward to DB elite for improvements

I always jump from language to language. Used DBC, then DBP, then various other diversions, then GLB, AppGameKit, Unity etc. It just depends what is best at the time.

The game I'm currently doing would be difficult to do for multiple platforms and so Unity is best at the minute (AGK can't do it without 3D and GLB isn't good enough at collisions). Different language syntaxes shouldn't be an issue if you are a half decent programmer (C# scripts have been a walk in the park so far).

The next game I'm thinking of though I'll probably use AppGameKit as it's quite simple, AppGameKit is capable of handling it, and I think I can knock it out pretty quickly. Plus like mentioned above I do like the total control.

And I'm sure DBE (I prefer Extreme but Elite will have to do!) will come on my radar at some point and may lend itself to a future game. If DBE compiles PC games that run a lot faster than AppGameKit then a runaway iOS hit, for example, is worth the effort of recoding in DBE (plus all the extra access to shaders etc on a PC). Totally looking forward to that!

Cheers

i am less than decent programmer in my opinion, My motivation is the result of my work and satisfaction that stuff ends up working as i wanted it to. my flaw is impatience that discourages me to go through the stages of learning new languages even tho i know that i can lean if i put good effort into learning and be patient for long enough for the fruits of my efforts to ripe.

My attachment to dark basic pro is very strong altho i did try to learn another game engine which ran on Lite C which seemes to be very close relative of C#. andit was like you said easy to learn, but then i got sidetracked and abandoned trying to learn it.

I realized that i truly dont enjoy the process of programming, neither do i care about learning a language. To me its just the neceseary hoops i have to jump trough to be able to make something cool with it which my final goal and reward that i work for.

Contrary to the screaming part of my brain that loves dark basic pro i agree that i should try other languages and engines, Getting into them is the hardest part and i guess i might as well do it while i secretley hope for Dark Basic Elite to become a real thing.

Anyway, i think i am reading too much into my personal self motivation issues and fear of getting out of my comfort zone. lol. I am my own enemy sometimes and i hate it.

Ah now there is the rub. I think hobbyist programmers (which we all are here really), regardless of what they do in their day job (I am actually a programmer for a living), are either in two camps. One *loves* programming, like a normal person would maybe love a puzzle game, and the other just views it as a tool as a means to an end. It's difficult to work day in day out in code when you really don't like doing it. The end result must have to be an amazing idea to truly motivate this type of person.

Personally I would in this case try a more non-programming route to making a game (eg. Unity with plugins can greatly reduce actual coding although it's costly) or hone other skills you maybe more excited about. eg. Modelling.

Yeah "comfort zone" can be a terrible thing. My first job was as a programmer in an obscure ancient Unix language. I only joined for a year to get experience. Totally loved it though. 17 years later I am essentially doing the same job. Most people have been made redundant but I was lucky enough to get into a position where I am still here (although working from home in Cyprus). So far so good (sort of), but for long term I really should have bailed and started again years ago in something like a Java, VB, C++, or C# job. I just didn't because I was being paid really well, had good mates, was in a good position, and enjoyed it. Most importantly though I was afraid of starting something new, probably at a much lower position. Basically the "comfort zone".

Cheers

I can relate to that Pagan, I just don't learn anything unless I have to - my trick is to never stare at a blank page. I decide on a project, and see where it leads, learning what is required along the way because there's no other way forward. My current project lead me to start learning C++ because it's something that is best played on a tablet, iPad primarily, so to do that, I need to make a C++ version. Anytime I've tried to learn some C++ I've pushed it to the side before long... it's a mistake to buy a C++ book to learn C++ for me - better to work on a project and learn through necessity, than to try and learn from a book. Everyone likes their comfort zone I know, but it's also nice to make your comfort zone bigger.

For me, coding has to be something of a challenge, otherwise it's just not as much fun. When I use C++, often things get messy, I have to research and figure out new techniques, ask for help - which is not really an issue when using DBPro or AGK. Thing is though, the peaks and troughs when using C++ are much more severe - like hitting a roadblock is worse, sometimes it can take a while to figure out how to do something that DBPro can do in 1 command.... BUT when something finally works it's a real buzz. When I finally got OpenFeint working on my iOS game, I actually stood up and did a little dance!. Really, I think that developers who are stuck in a rut, can't be bothered working etc, are basically in need of a better, more interesting project to work on. I'm sure I've said it before, necessity is the cure for procrastination - if you procrastinate, then you really don't believe that the end goal is necessary.

Indeed. But when you have dependents, big mortgage, large bills, loans etc, and your wage is pretty good, then it is very hard to take a chance, especially when you know you will probably halve your salary at least starting at a lower position (basically doing exactly what you do now). It's a tough call.

I did that when I first got my demo code to appear on the phone (and again for Android and WebOS). Initial iOS setup is (or was as it's getting easier it seems) a special kind of pain. I haven't used OpenFeint yet, but I did a little dance when I got iAds working. One day I'll buy a new iPad (*cough* case) with the profits from that one

Cheers

As much as i dont enjoy programming, i cant go back to non programing if i want to actually get something cool done because i accept the fact that programming can make some really cool stuff.

Also dark basic was useful for more than just making games. Once i was going to buy a new vaccum cleaner, and while i was reasearching vaccum cleaners, i realized that industrial/professional cleaners measure air pressure/ suction speed using actual units of physics (i dont remember what they are called, mBar i think) but all the vaccum cleaners that are sold to general consumers, use a different measurment called AirWatt which i later found is not even a real unit just something they made up for marketing purposes. Anyway this was my first time buying a vaccum cleaner and i had nothing to compare it to to get any idea of which vaccum cleaner is more powerful and by how much. After looking into the whole airwatt thing, i stumbled upon a guy who developed some mathematical equasion that converts airwatts (combined with some of the vaccum cleaner specs) to real air pressure units, (the results are never accurate since airwatt isnt a real thing apperentley, but it always come to close approximity of the correct air pressure specs of a vaccum cleaner. Anyway to make my work easier, i quickly wrote a dark basic program that converts airwatts into somewhat real units. Using my new DB vaccum suction power converter, i quickly realized that 50000 AIRWATTS, is nothing but a long pretty overglorified number roughly equvalent to 15 mBar units which is apperentley very weak. I got curios about my old soviet vaccum cleaner that started falling apart after about 30 years of use. I went to the internet and started looking for any technical documentation on it, and i ended up finding a very detailed scanned technical documentation on my old vaccum cleaner, (it even included technical data of other vaccum cleaners some of which are industrial vaccum cleanrs, there was also detailed report on all the quality controlled testing it had to go trough and a bunch of other neat stuff and the most interesting thing is, back when the old vaccum cleaner was manufactured they properly used mBar units and not AIRWATTS! and finally, what came as a surprise, this 30 year old vaccum cleaner i was gonna replace, is more powerful than any consumer vaccum cleaners that are sold these days. I decided to get myself an industrial vaccum cleaner and i am very happy with it, If it wasnt for Dark Basic Pro i may have never figured this out as i am too lazy to do that equasion in my brain, Instead i just enter some specs of the vaccum cleaner and the amount of AIRWATTS! and the program pretty ,much tells me if the vaccum cleaner is crap or not.

So thats my bizzare story about how dark basic saved me from buying cheap crap.

Also, i guess i exxagerated when i said, i dislike programming. i enjoy programming in dark basic, When i tried learning Lite C or did visual basic assigment back in school, i didnt enjoy the experience of programming, but i guess i kinda like dark basic, it has certain friendliness to it.

Also while coding is one of the more tedious things i have to do, the fun stuff is the 3d and game mechanics and stuff, Always get exited to press the f5 key to see if my code worked or not.