Sorry your browser is not supported!

I have a few add ons to the DB that i bought (AI, Physics, lights , extends etc) and now i have also downloaded sparkys dll as i have heard great things about it. But i am not entirely sure i have the help files in the right place. They all seem to be as they are placed in the same folder the standard commands are and they show up ok. Also for the modules that i bought with the game studio it auto installs them anyway so i would presume them to be in the right place. This is not the case though as i cant find a single help file for anything i have installed beyond DB pro itself. Where do i have to put them for them to be on show as a part of DB's existing help files as i feel i am missing out on some knowledge here by the fact that i have either put them in the wrong place or they have been installed inthe wrong place.

Can anyone help me with the help?

Hi. If I understand you correctly, the problem is that you can't access the new help files from the IDE help screen. The reason is because the plugin help files are separate. You should still be able to load them by hitting f1 after commands but to access them from the menu, you will have to edit the menu yourself. Personally, I just add plugins to the list on the main menu.

I don't have most of your plugins but for the ones I do, I can tell you this. For Dark AI, you should look for 'DarkAI.chm' in the Help folder. For eXtends, your looking for 'DBE_Main.htm' in Help\eXtends\.

To include these in the main DBP help files, open commands.htm in the Help folder in any text editor. You can add new lines such as:



This will provide a link directly to the Dark AI help from your other help files. If you do this though, always remember to make a backup of the edited version as DBP updates will overwrite your help files and revert them to how they were. Hope this helps. Just say if this was not what you were getting at.

Im not too sure really whats going on. I cant find files like DarkAI.chm in any of the help folders, nor anything for the other plugins but i have thousands of html documents for all the help commands and presumed with them being in the help folder of dark basic that it would show up there. After all the installers for the plugins put them there. I cant think of anywhere to move them and i cant fnid those files. I may have messed this up considerably i think but i always remember that they never showed up in the help files anyway. I will continue the search for the .chm files and see if i can change the lines in the open commands htm. Hopefully this will solve it.

Thanks for looking into my problem.

Ok so i found darkai.chm but i tried adding that code, and i also tried adding the full path to where it was located but it just comes up with a completely blank screen. I tried it will a htm for the matrix utilities that were already in the help folder but that too did not work. I am not sure what im doing wrong here but it seems more hassle than it is worth. The only way to browse though is opening the folders and looking into each of them to see what commands may or may not be available and then how to use them. I really dont like this method but nothing else i have tried works unfortunatley, for example i tried
26. <a href=commands\Matrix1_Index.htm>MATRIX COMMANDS</a><BR>
But this just shows a blank screen despite matrix utils and all its many htm files are all in that folder. I would have thought that would work because its all that core does or any of the other standard files and its where they are located.

Edit: I think i found the problem. None of them bar all the standard DB pro commands, are htm files, they are html. I would have thought they were the same but that was just being presumptuous, after clicking on properties i found they were not named the same. I should now be able to add all the help files i wish now by just finding the indexs of each plugin i have installed.

Many thanks for your help, i would not have done it without you.

2nd Edit: Ok maybe i was not so lucky, i cant add anything useful really except the matrix utilities because no one else has bothered to make any index htmls (grateful to ian for the fact that he has done this). So really the only way to get commands is to open the respective folders and bring up the chm files which is not the worst thing in the world i just wonder what all the extra htm's and htmls on things like physics and lights that are lying around for, why go to the trouble. I would have prefered them to be in the IDE but i am running dual monitors so ill just pop them into there when i want to reference them. Anyway it was a bit of fun trying to learn a bit of html there for a moment

I'm all for an online help file system for DarkBASIC Professional and all of its add ons, but unfortunately, to set up an online help all by myself would take years!

I started a wikia a month or so ago, and I believe it's a great system that could work if more of the DBPro community help out with building it...

http://dbprohelp.wikia.com/wiki/DarkBASIC_Professional_Help_Wiki

Hi again. Glad you've got Matrix1 linked in. Now I don't know what IDE you're using but if you try and open the chm files in the legacy editor (the icon is the old pyramid), then nothing will happen. However if you use the new Synergy based IDE or Codesurge like I do, then you should find that on clicking on the link, a dialogue box jumps up asking if you want to open or save the file. Just click open and you should get the chm file in its own window.

Are you sure about there being no other index htmls? I don't have lights or physics so I can't check but you have to remember that the index's aren't always helpfully placed directly under Help. Sometimes, they are placed in their own subfolder along with all their individual commands. You have to look for anything with the words command, index or main as they can be named many different things. To give you some examples:

Enhancements - Enhancements\Enhancements.chm
Box2D - commands\box2d\toc_index.html
Styx - styx\main.htm
eXtends - eXtends\DBE_Commands.htm

Hope this helps. Have fun with html.

Burning Feet Man: Great idea with the Wiki. Didn't see you had made this before but I'll certainly be having a look now.

@Lucas Tiridath. Yeah i got extends working, which is nice as it has sooooo much stuff to learn i wanted it all there for a quick reference. I dont have box2d or the other stuff on there. All i really wanted was lights, physics and ai as they are the only ones missing from my help files so to speak. The IDE i am using is just the standard DB pro jobbie. If anyone finds a way to sucessfully include physics, lights and ai i will go ahead and do them but for now at least i have a rough overview of the commands by opening the folder they are in and i got eXtends and matrix working so i am well chuffed with that so thanks for the help, i wouldnt have figured it out as i know nothing about html (Although now i know a little bit more)

@Burning Feet Man. Thats a great project, i presume you have set up a post previously advertising this to get some help from folk? Are people helping you out with this? How does one contribute? Is it just a case of copy pasting the commands we have from various extensions? I think it would be nice to see this expand to cover all the extensions you can download free or buy linked in with small tutorials for each and maybe a paragraph or two as to what the extension can do for you (to help you make your mind up as to whether you would want it or not). So kind of like a full comprehensive "This is where you go when you start DB Pro and havent a clue" site. As a lot of tutorials are difficult to find for beginners as most sites i found at the beginning are no longer available and the posts referencing said tutorials have obviously not been updated for a long while so now it seems small pockets of good tutorials are scattered all over the show.

I am currently working through the hands on volume one book (and some other tutorials i found here and there) and it is a fantastic book and a great way to get started but i have noticed a few errors here and there and as the book was written over 5 years ago some things have changed and examples have had to be worked around to get them to work as it has never had an update so i started taking notes and intend to contact the author just to not only thank him for an excellent book but perhaps hopefully inspire him to update it a touch with a second edition for future users by including some bits where its gone astray which i have no doubt he probably knows but i dont know for sure so why not. If DB pro continues to be updated and people are still buying it and it will live on for a while, a second edition could be worth the while as for me it is the definitive place to start, second to that i would say DC Foremans vid tutorials are excellent to go along with it as they too have a nice amount of "hands on get stuck in and do it yourself" theme to them. If this site had all that to reference it maybe it would be nice to link beginners to it instead of sending them to a dozen or so gems of information hidden among broken links and places a noob probably should not start. Keep up the good work, if i can help i will, but id probably best spend my time learning before i can be of use to folk.

Glad you're still making progress. If you're still using the legacy editor, I for one would advise you to upgrade. For one thing, I don't think it's even supported by TGC any more because they have their new editor to focus on. Personally, as I said, I use Codesurge which you can download free here. If you're up to date with your version of DBP, you should already have the new editor. It can be found in the DBP directory under Editor\EditorNew.exe . Both of these support opening .chm files from your help window which should solve your problem for DarkAI and Dark Physics at least. There are of course other alternatives but I've not tried them.

I'm not sure why you haven't got the Dark Physics help file but it's not a problem as you can download it from TGC here anyway. That said, when I downloaded this, I only got the information file but it should give you most of the info you need. Just place it in your help folder and use your new html skills to plug it in . It should be connected just like any other link. Remember to right click > properties > unblock or you will just get the "navigation to the webpage was cancelled" message when you open it.

Btw I agree about the hands on series - great books if you can lift them to get them onto your desk. Wouldn't know about the mistakes though cos I never did the examples :p

If im honest i am not sure exactly what is meant by IDE. I thought it was the thing you type into that compiles the code, is this right? If so what is the legacy IDE is that the one that comes with darkbasic and if so then arent they updating that because only recently a new version came out. I am a little confused, sorry.

The book is great but some bits and bobs here and there really need updating as a lot of the examples work far too fast for modern machines and a total noob might not know how to slow them down. In fact in one particular example (Listing 22.14) there is a way to extend the game by adding another sprite to shoot at. The speed is set to 12 which is rediculously fast but slowing it down to 1 does not help as its still far too fast. Changing this to a float and using something like 0.2 wont help as the program moves the sprite around on its x co-ordinate which cannot be incremented by 0.2 or anything below 1 so it either goes too quick or doesnt move, making this example defunct. Try it and see what i mean.

Anyway, back to the editor, if you could explain what each thing is i might understand better as i think what i think the IDE is might not be the IDE. Much appreciated!

You're quite right about Integrated Design Environments - they are the programs which you write your code in. They provide numerous features such as syntax highlighting and held indentation to make your code writing easier than, say, simply writing in notepad. Two IDEs come with DarkBASIC Pro at the moment: the old one which is (I think) no longer supported and the new one which is probably what you mean by a new version. In fact it is a different piece of software based on the Synergy IDE.

This is what the legacy IDE looks like:


And this is what new Synergy based IDE looks like:


If your chm files aren't launching, I'm thinking you're using the legacy IDE. Both are simply programs (exe files) and both are located in the Editor folder. The legacy editor is called 'editor.exe' whilst the Synergy based editor is called 'NewEditor.exe'.

I'd check out your example from the book but I'm afraid I'm at uni atm so I don't have my hands on dbp books with. Got my faithful tome of Hands on C++ though . I can't go anywhere without at least one of them.


Hope this helps clarify. Do say if it doesn't. Regards.

Ahh yes, that synergy one is the one i am using. After DB was updated it all turned to that. So that bottom pic is the exact one i am using. Should i be using a different one? Is there anything wrong with the synergy IDE?

No there's nothing wrong with the new Synergy based editor. I personally don't use it because I don't get on with the indentation mechanism but it should work fine with your help files and is fully supported. So what is the issue when you try and open help files which are in the compiled html format (.chm files)? When I click on a link to a chm file, it offers me the option to save or open it. By clicking open, it opens for me in a new window. Does it not do this for you?

Yes it does, i managed to make it do that for the chm file that comes with Darkai, its not perfect but it works.
What would have been nicer is if the people who made it forced it to incorporate itself not only into the help files but with its own sections under examples and so on when it installed, with a handy little guide on what it does over DB's version of whatever it does. But you cant have it all
I might look into changing the IDE but would not know which one to go for, people keep saying things about how good blueIDE is but it doesnt seem to have been updated for many years and the thread relating to it is locked unless i was looking in the wrong place. For now i guess synergy will do.

Indigo is the newest incarnation by Balid based on BlueIDE.

http://forum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=176316&b=5

Glad to see a little bit of interest from this thread for the DarkBASIC Professional Help wikia.

I haven't created an official thread, and have only posted a few posts in another DBPro help thread in the "Bug Reports" forum, link here;

http://forum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=17750&b=15

I started copying and pasting some content out from the help files a few weeks ago, but obviously the plan is to write more helpful examples and code snippets, whilst linking everything via the wikia category system. From what I've been testing, it works really, really well, and I think it'll be a brilliant help site for those picking up the language.

Feel free to start adding or working on existing pages. If a few people show interest, I'll start actively working on it again too.

EDIT: No idea why the link isn't working in my signature... The syntax reads ok. >_>

EDIT 2: Testing...

DarkBasic Help Wikia

BFM - the forum uses href= without the quote marks around the address, maybe that would fix your sig?

like thus



DarkBasic Help Wikia