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DarkBASIC Discussion / Hi to you all. A question about DarkBasic and difference between BlitzBasic2D or 3D?

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DrRunCMD
4
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Joined: 29th Feb 2020
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Posted: 29th Feb 2020 01:11
I posted previous to this post here but I then noticed there is a DarkBasic thread discussion here. OOPS!

Can anyone tell me what the major differences are between DB and BB BASIC code? Is it more technical and more in depth?
And, is it worth changing to DB for writing 2d platform games?
I have made a Tilemap Mario 2D clone plat-former using BB3D and was quite a difficult challenge and I found there was not a lot of granular control when it came to certain aspects of the game functions.
Would something like DB have more in depth control and more a technical BASIC language or not?

I also have converted a BlitzMAX Mario Clone which had all its media/maps/sounds baked in the EXE and full code was supplied in BLITZMAX Had no names attached to the media either once extracted.
I managed to rename all images correctly and able to compile the code. Now I have it working.
If anyone is interested or cares, I will post it here.

I am not a professional coder although I should be by now. I started out with a BBC Micro at school, (I own a BBC Master myself), and learnt BASIC code from the ZX Spectrum and Amiga systems after.
I can look at any code and understand what it is doing and learning from it.

Thanks and Hi to you all!
Raven
19
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 23rd Mar 2005
Location: Hertfordshire, England
Posted: 29th Feb 2020 13:24
For the most part BLITZ BASIC and Dark BASIC Classic are very similar in terms of their variant of BASIC Syntax and Core Commands.
And I'd argue that these tend to be quite close to Quick/Microsoft BASIC (which was fairly standard for most 8bit Computers), unlike a lot of Modern BASIC.

Now, would I use Dark BASIC today?
Generally speaking, no.
Mainly because it's Compatibility (because it uses DirectX 8.1) is quite low... at least in terms of Windows Vista, 7 and 8., weirdly Windows 10 actually fully supports it provided you install the DirectX 8.1 Redistributable and package it with a key Runtime DLL (d3drm.dll, which I've attached to this post as it can be a bit tricky to find on "Trusted" Sources today). Still if you are only intending to release for Windows 10 (or Linux / Mac with Darwine) then it actually tends to work more issue free than Dark BASIC Professional.

While you likely wouldn't have heard this admitted on these forums back when they started (given the rivalry between Dark and Blitz BASIC) ... the reality is that Blitz typically was faster at Logic, 2D and 3D.
What Dark BASIC typically had going for it, was that you had a bit more Low-Level Access... which allowed you to do some "Cool" things (primarily with MemBlocks) that were much more difficult until BlitzMax., but at that point Dark BASIC Professional was released and it was frankly superior in Performance and Capabilities.

For better or worse... AppGameKit is actually the current iteration of Dark BASIC., albeit arguably stripped down in some respects and a bit to heavily geared towards Mobile Development.
Still it does retain a lot of the classic elements of Dark BASIC, and is running on a "Modern" (Portable) Graphics API.

There are plenty of Sample Code that's in the Code Snippets Area, provided you go back far enough (there is a search feature, and DBC Code is tagged as such typically) to see what people did with it and what's possible.

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