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I'm not exactly a newbie to darkbasic, in the sense that I follow the community projects and general test out different games that come out of some of the community sites (basically I'm a lurker).

Recently I decided that I'm going to take the plunge and see if perhaps I can actually create, rather then just play games. Like many I'm an enthusiast and so i purchased DarkGame Studio.

Shortly after pressing the 'buy' button I realized that ... wait a minute, while I want to get started, was spending 80+ dollars for all these tools really nescessary?

I was curious what the communities take was on the DarkGame studio package, its tools and wether or not they are worthy buys (usefull and functional). I guess what I'm asking was, as a newbie just getting started, did I just spend a lot of money on something I probobly wont use much at least initially?

living in Australia the DGS pack cost me $140 AUS and i still thaught it was good to buy..

I soon realized i would actually have to program with it and it wasnt drag and drop, but the thing was that i got in and learnt real quick and have done a few small products..

The biggest piece of advice i can give you is when you are in the editor and the cursor is over a command you can press f1 and it will tell you all about that command, i have learnt soo many commands with that.....

I had assumed that I would be programing in DarkBasic, so I knew I was going to the next level from things like NeverWinter Nights (1 & 2) style modding to more 'real' development. Although i'm still hoping that some of the more tedius work like 'area design' will be point and click to some extent using things like the Cartographer. I also don't plan on spending too much time developing models and things as I think there is an ample amount of freely available models to make unique and interesting representation for units in games as well as many dynamic tools (aka creating tree's, plant life etc..)

My only concern i guess with the DGS pack is that the value of having all those tools wouldn't be particularly applicable, hopefully thats not the case. I'm hoping that I find the tools helpful in expiditing aspects of development that are... I'm not sure if boring is the right word here, but, less exciting.

DarkGAME Studio provides a great collection of software designed to get users on the path to making games. It includes media you can use, media creation programs such as treemagik and plantlife for outdoor scenes, all three generations of The Game Creators programming tools. DarkBASIC Classic, Professional and DarkGDK C++ (which you can also download for free). Tools such as DarkSHADER make it much eaiser later on to deploy shader technology which every new game uses.

I assure you, if you where to spend money on all these programs seperately the cost would be considerably higher. I've had a few e-mails come through the support system from users asking if all the versions of the sofware included where the full versions because they had trouble beleiving the discount it represented.

If you buy the package you'll almost certainly end up using DarkBASIC Professional. To give you a better idea of how it all works I've prepared a number of video tutorials (all completely free) demonstrating how to create a simple random number guessing game, right up to making a basic version of 3D Frogger, featuring sections dealing with 3D objects and Collision detection.

http://www.darkprinciples.co.uk just click on tutorials and free tutorials.

There's one tutorial there you may want to pay special attention too, which is "4# Using TreeMagik G3 with DarkBASIC Professional" which guides you through the process of making a tree with TreeMagik, loading it into DBPro and setting it up for transparancy. It ends by showing you how to create a forest. Fog effects and adjust ambiant lighting for atmosphere.

Yes it's a good deal. When you start out all you'll need is Darkbasic Pro. As you get better at programming the other stuff that came with Dark Studio will come in handy.