Introducing DarkBasic Pro a powerful yet easy to learn programming language for creating games. PC Plus calls DarkBasic Pro "Specifically suited to both new programmers and veterans alike." DarkBasic Pro lets you create ANY type of game with almost any kind of 2D/3D effect and even lets you make games using Quake3 levels. It's that powerful flexible and easy to use. Binary Space Partitioning for fast screen draws Pixel & Vertex shaders for more realistic look Bone based animation support for smooth character movement 2 environment mapping techniques for realistic reflections Multitexturing for more varied and exciting game scenes Light mapping for creating atmospheric shadows Professional Editor (IDE) with Windows XP style controls for quicker programming Particle system that lets you create sparks explosions water or snow Multiple player support for LAN and internet game creation And much much more!System Requirements: IBM PC or 100% compatible computer Intel Pentium II 300 or higher processor Windows 95/98/Me/2000/XP 64 MB RAM 450 MB hard disk space 4x CD-ROM drive or higher Direct3D compatible graphics card (with 8 MB or above) DirectX compatible sound card Keyboard DirectX 7.0aFormat: WIN 9598ME2000XP Genre: PRODUCTIVITY UPC: 708828188886 Manufacturer No: 18888

Powerful language for creating games

Ideal for both beginners and more experienced programmers

Create 2-D and 3-D effects

Make games using Quake 3 levels

Powerful, flexible, and easy to use

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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.

49 of 50 found the following review helpful:

Easy and fun to learn, powerful, educational.Dec 14, 2003
By Carlos Santiago
Look no further for an easier language to learn, DarkBASIC Pro (DBPro) is by far the easiest language in the market today. The language is procedural and not object oriented, it contains many of the "old school" BASIC commands such as DATA, RESTORE, GOTO, GOSUB plus many modern features such as pointers and user-defined data types. This language is even used in introductory programming courses in many educational institutions all over Europe because of its ease of learning.

If you are planning to develop your own games for commercial purposes, it will be good to know that your games will be license and royalty free, and all games can be distributed as .EXE files with no need to have a runtime application.

In terms of power for developing games I can tell you that it is a very strong and fast language. You can witness its power by going through the many demos with source code included on the bundled CD as well as their website darkbasicpro.com.

Creating your programs is very simple using their Windows-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE), this is one of the many differences between this language and its little brother DarkBASIC.

What types of games can you create? mostly anything you can imagine: 3-D games, First Person Shooters (FPS) such as Quake, Unreal Tournament and Half-Life, Role playing games (RPGs), 2-D scrolling games (a la R-Type), Maze Games (Pac-Man), Multi-player, Online games, Educational, your imagination is the limit. There's even a best-selling professional driving simulation program developed in England using DBPro (http://www.thegamecreators.com/?f=dts), so you get the idea on the quality level you can reach using this relatively inexpensive development tool.

DBPro is not drag and drop, let's be very clear, but the language commands are intuitive and easy enough to understand for anyone without exposure to programming. To have an idea, I'll show you a 4 line program that creates a 3-D cube and rotates it on it's Y axis, something that would require hours using other programming languages:
MAKE OBJECT CUBE 1,100
DO
YROTATE OBJECT 1,OBJECT ANGLE Y(1) + 0.1
LOOP
The parameters that follow the commands (e.g. 1,100) are easily understood by simply looking at the context-sensitive HELP menu, summoned with F1 while highlighting the command (In this code example the 1 is the object number assigned to the cube and 100 is the cube size.)

There's a 30-day full-featured downloadable demo version of DBPro on their website. The HELP menu has all the commands available with brief instructions on their purpose. The full version has even working versions of code examples (showcase examples) for every command plus thousands of sample images, maps, sound effects, sprites, etc. to get you started real quick with your own games. I'd recommend downloading this demo to get a good taste of the language and determine if it is for you.

Make sure to download the DBPro patch from their website as soon as you install the CD, to have the latest and greatest release. The DBPatch can not be applied to the demo version though.

The only negative comments I have about this product is their language documentation included in the box. It could be more detailed and extensive. The good thing is that the DBPro community is growing and there are many resources for learning on the Internet. Amazon has a good introductory book on DarkBASIC (with some DBPro on it), ISBN 1592000096, but I think this book still lacks many advanced features since it was written mostly for DarkBASIC. If you are not familiar with 3-D terminology I would recommend to purchase an introductory book in this subject, or do an Internet search for this topic before getting your hands in the 3-D commands of DBPro.

Recommended for game enthusiasts, beginners and to-be professionals.

21 of 23 found the following review helpful:

Great expectations leads to disappointmentApr 13, 2005
By Timothy L. Heermann "musicalglass"
I'm an Artist / Animator not a programmer.
I tried learning C++, Java, Unreal Script. No matter how hard I try, I just can't learn it. When I heard there was a 3D game engine around which uses a derivitave of BASIC as the core language, I can't tell you how psyched I was.
So I went to the DarkBasic website and they have DarkBasic, which is cheap, and DarkBasic Professional, which is a bit more, so I figured I'd check out the basic package and start simple.
First thing you find is that there is no real How To Use This Product. There is a help feature of sorts, but code examples are of the cribnote variety: they are not actual working code examples but syntactical representations of code. A college professor with knowledge of basic computer science could decipher it. But if no one has taken the time to explain to you what an X and Y coordinate is, for instance, how are you going to know that X and Y means insert numbers here?
Fortunately I did know a bit about BASIC from my old Commodore 64 days, but even so, couldn't make anything happen till going to the homepage for tutorials. There are a couple on the main page. If you follow the first tutorial, you can toss together a few basic elements into a rudimentary first person shooter game. However I didn't want to make yet another of way too many first person shooter games. I have other game ideas.
So I go in search of more tutorials and there is a mere smattering of unfinished references around. Fortunately, a friend of mine loans me the 750 page book: Beginner's Guide to DarkBasic Programming. Unfortunately, if you took away all the author's attempts to impress you with his knowledge of computer science, it boils down to maybe 20 pages of actual content. (On page 48 they're still explaining how to install the software.)
After getting my hands on what useless tidbit's I could find about as far as documentation, I was starting to get the understanding of how it worked, but still needed fuel for the fire. I marched down to the library and checked out every book on Liberty Basic, GWBasic, Microsoft Basic, etc, and starting translating the beginner's examples into DB. Now I was finally able to make some headway! Before long I was manipulating 3D game content around like I'd been doing it all my life.
I started finding a few bugs here and there, then come to find out, they are no longer doing any updates to DarkBasic 1. It's obsolete. So I got the DarkBasic Professional Demo.
First of all there are some problems with the Editor. It's incomplete. Apparently the guy who was working on that part left the company due to "personal differences" and left them without the source code, so any problems there cannot be fixed.
[...]
I would give this 6 stars on concept alone.
However the the implementaion leaves much to be desired.
For documentation, they get a big fat ZERO

I think this product has a tremendous amount of potential if they would just finish what they started before moving on to another project. They could easily have one of the premiere game authoring platforms if they would just get back on track with their core BASIC engine and stop trying to follow in the footsteps of HalfLife and Unreal Tournament

12 of 12 found the following review helpful:

Powerful, easy to use game developmentMar 11, 2006
By Will
If you're looking to create the next Doom 3 or Half-Life 2, then I can't really recommend this program. If you want to make an advanced FPS game, or a simple pong game, then I can recommend Dark Basic. In fact, Dark Basic Professional is probably capable of creating any kind of game that you can come up with. The catch? You have to program it yourself, all from scratch. Dark Basic makes manipulating 3D data extremely easy, but it's not a game creation package which lets you click and create. If you are determined enough, it's easy to learn all of Dark Basic's commands, as half of programming a game is in the logic. Dark Basic will hardly limit you, and will give you capabilities that were probably impossibly hard for you to use in C++. The end result of creating a game from scratch results in a tremendous sense of satisfaction, especially when you share it with friends and family. Although previous versions of Dark Basic Professional had some hardly crippling bugs, most of them have been eliminated, and with the release of upgrade 6.0, DBPro is a very stable development engine. Overall, I totally recommend this to anyone who wants to create a game, but is determined enough to learn how.

28 of 33 found the following review helpful:

Once the shine wears offMay 22, 2004
By Peter Patterson
I have read the other reviews of this product, and wouldn't dispute any of those users experiences with it. There are however many things that become evident once the shine wears off and you try to go beyond the simple spinning cubes you can get running in ten minutes or so.

I have been using DarkBasic now for several months, and while I was initially as enthusiastic as most of the other reviewers, I have run into enough problems that only become apparent when you try to go beyond the basics that I feel compelled to submit a more balanced review.

For example.. while one review mentions the built in help system that has a brief description of each command, what they failed to mention was that this brief description is the only description of the commands available at all even in the printed manual. The printed docs and the online docs are one and the same, and they are not only brief, but provide circular definitions in many cases, and they are definitely not comprehensive descriptions of what each command does.

The reviewer also mentioned the extensive examples, but failed to point out that the examples are lumped into several huge programs that do nothing meaningful except to demonstrate one particular way to use each command and do nothing to help you figure out how to use each command in all possible ways. Again.. there is no comprehensive reference to all of the commands the language provides.

The online help forums are indeed helpful, but more to the point you will almost certainly have to go there to find out how to use the language. Sufficient information and examples are not provided in the box to use this language on your own, even if you are a professional developer.

Familiarity with Direct X will only help out so far. While DarkBasic Pro is really a thin wrapper for accessing the underlying functionality of Direct X, most of the familiar Direct X terminology has been hidden and replaced with new terminology that is never explained leaving you guessing and experimenting just to find out how a command is supposed to work.

Updates for the program are also few and far between. There are many bugs in the various commands that make entire sets of functionality impractical to use, and many of the DarkBasic forum members have games they would like to ship, but cannot do so until and unless updates are provided to make functionality that is advertised as being in the product already work.

Word is that there may be an update sometime around the fall, but if you are used to using other development tools and getting frequent patches, give some thought to how this kind of infrequent update policy will impact your schedule. You should also check out their online forums and make sure that the features you think will make your development cycle go smoothly work as advertised. Some of the documented commands have actually been removed from the language, although they are still listed as valid commands and provide no indication that they have been disabled when you try to use them (other than simply not working).

My feelings about this product are not entirely negative. It is a very useful tool for rapid prototyping of 3D experiences, and it's a great way to explore Direct X concepts. As the teacher who wrote an earlier review said, it allows you to focus on the game aspects without worrying about the low level details, and it is also very cost effective.

There is also an SDK that allows you to expand the language by writing a DLL in C++, and there are many such free and inexpensive third party DLL's to expand the language beyond the basics.

But it falls short as a professional development tool primarily in the areas of documentation and simply working completely as advertised. You would probably find that you can get your idea implemented halfway five times faster than in some other game engine, but you might also find that after getting halfway there, something doesn't work and you need to spend a lot of time trying to come up with a workaround or having to redesign things using different commands.

In short.. if you just want to experiment with and learn about 3D, this product is perfectly suitable. If you want to use it to develop a professional game, or you want something that just works out of the box and doesn't require a lot of guesswork and experimentation, you may end up dissapointed.

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