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Newcomers DBPro Corner / Concerns with DarkBasic Professional

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Tampa Developer
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Posted: 9th Aug 2004 05:39
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Hi. I'm hoping someone could put my mind at ease about the following concerns;

1) DB Pro seems to be light on error messages and general troubleshooting. Anybody who's deployed professional software knows that a developers worst nightmare is shipping the code to customers and finding out it doesn't run on their hardware and having little information to go by in fixing it.

2) The forum moderators appear to be fond of censorship. As a professional developer, I make my money by using superior tools, not by being ignorant of the competition. If there is a post which compares DB to a competitor, please censor the individuals whom are causing trouble, not shut down a constructive and useful discussion of development tools. In reality, doing this only hurts DB. Leads me into next concern;

3) I've been making a living at developing for 12 years. I know C/C++/Java/C#/VB/Delphi/Perl/Shell scripting/C64 Basic/Asm/etc, but I want to find an environment where I can develop a half-way decent game in 6 months of 10 hour side-job work weeks. Is DB the right tool for this type of job?

4) The demo's that I've seen on this site have nice graphics, but seem to be undeveloped and/or abandoned projects. Perhaps I just don't know where to search, but it would be comforting to know that there have been projects that completed and went on to be something profitable. Does this exist?

While it might seem like I'm being hard on DB, these are legitimate concerns. There are also things I really like about DB. The HUGE developer community being the biggest plus. It looks like the documentation will be okay, once I actually purchase the product. Though I will say its frustrating to spend 2 hours trying to figure out how to dump a number out with the TEXT command because TGC refuses to provide examples with the demo version... It would be nice if TGC trusted people enough to allow a reasonable preliminary evaluation of their software. Ok, now I'm just being crabby because its tough work evaluating all these different gaming engines and environments. please forgive.

Tx,

Tampa Developer
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Mentor
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Joined: 27th Aug 2002
Location: United Kingdom
Posted: 9th Aug 2004 06:22
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you could try the search feature, there must be over 200 posts like this, the FAQ is a handy feature too, check the ones in the different forums and the post at the top of general chat, I get tired of typing in the same replies time after time (I ought to keep a file on my PC I can just cut`n`paste)

Mentor.

PC1: P4 hyperthreading 3ghz, 1gig mem, 2x160gig hd`s, Nvidia FX5900 gfx, 6 way surround sound, PC2: AMD 1.2ghz, 512mb ram, FX5200 ultra gfx, stereo 16 bit soundblaster.
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Nick Danger
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Posted: 9th Aug 2004 06:39
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Tampa Developer,
Personally, I've just started working with DBPro, but having been someone who made my living with VB for 5 years, I can give you some comparisons I hope you'll find helpfull. First: don't be so sure that the documentation will be so much better once you've paid... For example; I have yet to find any documentation on the editor itself. Then there's the examples... Don't even bother with the "Showcase Example" The link to it appears on every help page, but it doesn't contain all of the commands. A partial example for specific commands goes something like this code from the SPRITE help file: see attached code
I ended up buying "Beginner's Guide to DarkBasic Game Programming". And believe me, they do mean beginners. The DBPro documentation is very indicative of some people who are super sharp developers who love writing code, but documentation is no fun at all. And who wants to pay a technical writer, for god's sake? That having been said, I enjoy the language itself, from the use of "real word" commands to the deployment of a single executable file instead of the "DLL Hell" of VB. You can make your programs do a lot of really cool stuff very easily... and isn't that what gaming, and game writing all about? Someone who's been a professional developer for 12 years and, presumably, has a methodology in place should kick out a game in 6 or 7 months. Your media content will be the hard part, unless you have a brother-in-law who's a graphic artist/musician... Have Fun.
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zircher
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Posted: 9th Aug 2004 06:45
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As a long time VB programmer, I found DBP easy to get up to speed on. It is not as polished of a development environment as Visual Studio, but with your skill set you should have no problem with it.

I don't think the moderators are censoring as much as sensitive to flame bait. This forum has had a history of some senseless posting and the mods are perhaps a little too aggressive to stop it. [It gets a bit silly around Xmas and dies out over the summer as the newbs get seasoned.]

There are several projects that have gone commercial successfully. The Starwraith series, 3D Mahjong, and TGC's test driving program come to mind. There have also been some very nice contest entries that I think could make that transition to commercial status.
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TAZ

"Do you think it is wise to provoke him?" "It's what I do." -- Stargate SG-1
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Sir Spaghetti Code
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Posted: 9th Aug 2004 06:55
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I agree with Zircher. Only thing I have to add is that you can't judge the incomplete projects on the language, but the people. You will find this often with DB and BlitzBASIC. I believe the reason to that is that people see how easy it is to create simple graphics comands and how easy it is to create technical demos with these "super high-level" BASICs, that they underestimate the actual effort and time it requires to actually complete a project.

"I attribute the quarrelsome nature of the Middle Ages young men entirely to the want of the soothing weed."
-Jerome K. Jerome(1859-1927),Writer
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Ocean Runner
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Posted: 9th Aug 2004 06:58
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For proffesional games go to: http://www.starwraith.com

"Computers in the future may weigh no more then
1.5 tons. - Popular Mechanics, 1949
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Tampa Developer
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Posted: 9th Aug 2004 07:03
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Thanks all for the advice. The number of responses I've received on my question is really the meat and potatoes of why DB would be a good environment...

Question; Does anybody have experience with Carrara 3D Studio? The reason I ask is that I own it and I'm wondering how easy it will be to import things into DB.
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IanM
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Posted: 9th Aug 2004 21:56
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The reason that us moderators are 'fond of censorship' in this matter is that the discussions are nearly always one-sided, and pretty much always end up in flames.

Bear in mind that the average age of our forum members is relatively low, and that there can be a very vocal minority of 'fanboys' from each language.

IMO, you should pick the language (or languages) that suit your needs. Most people use DBC or DBPro on their own. I use DBPro+C++, others use DBPro+Delphi, DBPro+VB.NET etc

*** Coming soon - Network Plug-in - Check my site for info ***
For free Plug-ins, source and the Interface library for Visual C++ 6, .NET and now for Dev-C++ http://www.matrix1.demon.co.uk
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aArON ProSeries Soft
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Posted: 10th Aug 2004 00:59
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@Tampa Developer: My two cents, since you have 12 years experience in programming field, no offense though, me aint flamin db's name but if you have that much experience and you wished to go for commercial, design your own 3d egnine and later your own game engine, it will be alot better, dbpro is actually mroe for hobbyist/
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Tampa Developer
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Posted: 10th Aug 2004 05:59
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See, thats what I don't want to do; spend two years working on an engine before I write my first game. I know theres a good code base out there for writing games. The question isn't "is there one?", but "which one should I use as my starting point?"

I need something that allows me to develop children's games in the shortest amount of time, which works with most of the tools and skills I already have.

I've narrowed my selection down to the following four options... Torque was in first place, but their development community hasn't even responded yet to a question that was MUCH more polite than the question I posed here.

Here's the options;

1) 3D GameStudio
2) DarkBasic Pro
3) Torque Engine (garagegames.com)
4) Irrlicht..
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zircher
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Posted: 11th Aug 2004 01:07
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DBP is definitely capable of casual games for kids. I'd put it ahead of 3DGS and Torque for that goal. I don't know enough about Irrlicht to make an informed decision. At that point, I'd go with the one that you find easier to code in. If you're thinking about interactive books like Ruff's Bone or the Puff Puff series, DBP has built-in sprite support.
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TAZ

"Do you think it is wise to provoke him?" "It's what I do." -- Stargate SG-1
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Tampa Developer
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Posted: 11th Aug 2004 07:01
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Thanks Zircher. I think you're right. The deciding factor for me is time to develop. Little kids that are learning to read and write cannot use complicated 3d game worlds, so its a waste of time and effort to try and force an engine thats designed to do that do something different.

The only problem with DBPro is now I have a Mac Powerbook for sale, since I'm going to need to trade it in on a PC. That was one of my strong points for using Torque, but they implemented the 3D modeling in a gumpy way. You cannot just take a 3DS (or other) file and bring it into the engine. You have to have the software and a plug-in for said software that converts it to a Torque specific format. This really foobars me because I have Carrara 3D Studio. Even though it can dump out all kinds of formats, I can't use it because nobody made a plug-in to convert the data to Torque's specific format.

Of course I have no idea how DBPro does it, so it might be the same predicament. Anybody work with 3D stuff? Can I just import standard 3D file formats and translate/rotate them?
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zircher
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Posted: 11th Aug 2004 07:32
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Carrara 3D Studio can write 3DS, that keeps Irrlicht near the top if you like C++. DBP has had 3DS support, but the very latest version does not. I don't know if this is a temporary thing or not. Using a tool like Milkshape 3D to convert from 3DS to X is not a hardship. I need to ask TGC what their plans for 3DS support are.

If you're planning on using Carrara 3D Studio for 2D images. No problem there, both engines offer support for a wide number of 2D formats.
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TAZ

"Do you think it is wise to provoke him?" "It's what I do." -- Stargate SG-1
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Tampa Developer
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Posted: 14th Aug 2004 13:17
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Thanks to everybody for your help. Just an update; If I had a PC Laptop, DBPro would be a no brainer. But I've decided I don't want to sell the Powerbook. That means I need something cross platform. After extensive research, I've found an environment that looks almost as easy, just as powerful, and cross-platform. Python, Pygame, and PyOpenGL. There are books and IDE's available. So I'm going to try that. The DBPro community does seem better, so if I was going PC I would go DBPro. But I'm going cross-platform.
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zircher
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Posted: 17th Aug 2004 01:04
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A good choice, given the situation. Since you're getting into Python, I suggest checking out Blender 3D which uses Python and is also cross platform. The learning curve is a little steep, but the results look very good.
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TAZ

"Do you think it is wise to provoke him?" "It's what I do." -- Stargate SG-1
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