Great sleuthing
Dazzag, thanks.
This is just the thing to introduce high school technology students to programming.
I think quite a few sales of the existing compilers can come from the use of this demo.
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A review of DarkBASIC Pro on Amazon.com
Quote: "81 of 85 people found the following review helpful:
Excellent!!!!, April 12, 2004
Reviewer: J. Leigh "jleigh7" (chicago)
I am a professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago and I use this for my Game Programming class.
In my 15 years of being in the computer graphics field I have never seen a software package integrate all this high-end graphics capability, into a simple-to-use, yet real programming language that creates compiled code. Not only that, the compiled code can be bundled as an executeable that you can then distribute as a standalone running program. This is an excellent way for budding independent game programmers to get a start. Furthermore the online forum is EXCELLENT. I usually get an answer to my questions within half an hour! There are some real dedicated fans out there!
Things that my graduate students used to take a semester to write for research projects are now accessible with a simple command in this language. For example: Binary Space Partion Trees, Surround Sound, Forced Feed Joystick support, A multitude of camera manipulation capabilities, collision detection, model loading and animation, forward kinematics, toon shading, real time shadows, and the list goes on and on... I've even written code to enable stereoscopic rendering so that I can take the output of a dual-headed graphics card, feed it into 2 DLP projectors with polarizing filters. Now my students can write games in true stereoscopic 3D! I know I am not allowed to post web sites in a review, so if you want more info on how to do something like this do a google on geowall darkbasic.
The interesting thing about providing students with so much capability at their finger tips is that they tend to take it all for granted. My students were complaining that the system had this bug or that bug. The hot-shot students wanted to do the class project in C++ and OpenGL instead. So as an experiment, a few of them took an undergrad research class with me the following semester to try and rewrite the game that they had written in DarkBASIC Pro, in C++ and DirectX. A month later I asked them, "next year, when I teach the class again, should I use DarkBASIC or should I use DirectX and C++?" They all said DarkBASIC was the way to go. New students would be too bogged down on the tiny details to be able to understand the whole game development process in a semester. DarkBASIC Pro frees you to think about developing the graphics, the game play, the sound effects- not waste all your time hunting down pointer errors.
Also a great low cost modeling package to go with this is Milkshape. The DarkBASICPro website recommends 3D Canvas. All my students hated 3D Canvas. It was crashing all the time, had an unintuitive interface and created a kzillion windows registry entries making it impossible to use for multiple login IDs on a single Windows box. There were also frequent version changes where 3D models were no longer compatible. Very annoying."
I'm unique, just like everybody else.
