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A long while ago I purchased the well-acclaimed powerful 3D game maker, DarkBASIC. But I had to take a long break in game making to take on game-playing.

I'm back to it now and over the years apart, I have come up with some ideas that are a... little advanced. Unfortunately, now that I look at DB and look at the new packages on TGC, I wonder - is DarkBASIC alone (without enhancements) not useful anymore?

Any comments/opinions would be helpful.

The only use i can think of for the original DarkBasic is to make games that can run on Windows 95/98/pre DX9

Or ofcourse, GatorHex, you've the Star Wraith series (www.starwraith.com), which seems to me to be the most succesful DarkBASIC franchise, and as with any DBC game, run perfectly on what seems any OS DBP supports.

Each language has pro's and con's. It'll be hard to weigh out since you can't trial them very long, but DBC is in no way useless. It's just not really supported anymore.

The Driving Test Success series also started as a DB Classic creation. That sold 100,000+ copies

I read that question as "Is DarkBasic Professional, without any enhancement packs, good enough to make a game?" rather than a DBClassic vs DBP question.

If that's what you were asking, then the answer is yes. You don't need any enhancement packs at some. Most of them simplify something you could feasibly do yourself (with either a small, or large amount of work), but some of them do truly add new functionality though. Overall though, DBP is still capable of making complete games without any enhancement packs.

I've made several games in DBPro, and never once used an enhancement pack in any of them despite owning most of them.

Might sound like a waste of money, but the way I see it, these packs will come into their own when I start a major project - they're really best for more advanced projects where they can be incorporated fully, especially the more complex ones like DarkPhysics and DarkAI. eXtends, EZRotate and Styx do have lots of useful little features in them that would save a lot of coding though. Maybe it's just me deliberately trying to avoid learning them properly, but really I think that the plugins that provide complete solutions need to be used from the outset because they affect so much. If your planning a FPS, then using DarkPhysics for example is a great way to start it with a bang.

You don't need enhancment packs and anyway there are lots of free DLLs.

Free beer for all those free DLL makers, I appreciate it loads [Sparky Collision, MultiSync, MySQL are a few that come to mind.]

DarkBASIC Professional without Enhancements has basically the same features as DarkBASIC with Enhancements. So when upgrading between the two originally, I felt that was a plus.

You also have Structured Data Types, this I find extremely useful so that rather than having several variables named something like



I can now have



Now Player.X, Player.Y, Player.Z
Ironically it's slightly more code, but it just feels easier to manage.

What's more is you can cast a type rather than having to use the typecast symbol

So: Variable As Float/Integer/String rather than Variable/#/$
You also can have variable versions of this data as well, so rather than Integers and Floating-Points being 32-bit only; they can be (8/16)/32/64-bit (bracket numbers are integer only)

You also can have Dynamic Arrays. This is a great plus if you don't want to set a giant array to begin with, and just add or remove elements as and when you need them.

Being able to also TypeCast Arrays, also helps a great deal. So rather than multiple arrays or arrays with multiple elements you can just case a type. Have all of the data you need in a single element. e.g.



you can now do



also you can nestle types, so you could actually have:



Now rather than Player(Index).X you have Player(Index).Position.X
For stuff like that, nestling does nothing but make code much easier to read.

If you use a version before 5.2 i believe, then you still have a bug that was quite useful where you could cast pointers about using zero elements of type data arrays.

So this:



While that code itself is pointless, it should show what we did have available (and i think still is if you turn off safearray in the compiler.ini) to do.

Performance is also much improved, so it's much easier to get more going on at once. Also it has access to bones in models, which I felt was useful; so rather than having them as limb objects that did nothing, they actually work like you skinned them in your favourite modeling app.