Customer Reviews
Great expectations leads to disappointment 
2005-04-13
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
Best in class 
2004-10-10
After trying several game engines, in the "affordable" class, DarkBasicPro is the only one without high end limitations. As another reviewer said, it is a wrapper for DirectX. This means you have all the capabilities of DirectX, without the complexities, including shaders, sound, media, collision detection, packaging, etc. And it gives a good frame rate! The package has matured within the last year, and many of the earlier defects have been corrected. (The manual still leaves room for improvement. Buy the Dark Basic book also, and you will be happier!)
Dark Basic Pro now requires DirectX 9.0. And for really fast action games, you will need a reasonably powerful PC. If you find any command limitations, (even though it has over a thousand commands), you can always write your own DLL, and add capabilities, such as Octrees to the engine (which they don't have yet.) There now are several third party add-ons, such as "TreeMagik G2" and other enhancement packs which greatly aid in game construction. Check out the Game Creators web site, and the forums!
There are other game engines which are simpler, and "spoon feed" the process to you. But once you get a little experience, you will be frustrated by the limitations caused by the watered down interface. Dark Basic Pro is not that much more difficult to use, and is tremendously more powerful and flexible.
Good product, bad manual. 
2004-06-30
In reviewing this product, I would like to fairly say that I have not written a single complete program using this product yet.
Now, that scentance could be a double edged sword, it could meen I am incompetent, or it could meen there is something wrong with darkbasic pro. What I like to think is that dark basic pro has thoroughly flawed documentation. Just as Peter Patterson said in his review. The programing lanuguage is great and very easily allows you to write software very fast, yet, when you are stuck, the manuals are no help.
Many of the commands do not work as predicted, and same functions seem to be implemented differently for different commands. The 3D rotation commands can drive you nuts. The coordinates system also seems to be a bit unpredictable.
I love the programing language, and that is why I gave it four stars, but they realy need to work on the documentation and help files.
I heard there is an update, hope the documentation update is up to expectations.
Once the shine wears off 2004-05-22
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.
Excellent!!!! 2004-04-13
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.
Words cannot describe how awful this software is. 
2008-05-27
Slow.
Innefficient.
Weak.
Lame.
Just a few of the words I can use to describe the completely evil, horrible software people call darkBASIC Professional.
I am going to describe how awful this stuff is. The main problem is really the incredibly slow, innefficient code that is encumbered by the BASIC language. The included tutorials are so cryptic that it would take someone who already knows how to program (me) to understand it. Not only does it delude people into thinking that they know how to program graphics when they really can't, but it also skips over the "hard parts" of programming, thus making it impossible to use pointers.
It also makes implementing graphics considerably harder. With Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Express Edition(free), you can import you're graphics fairly easily using the included directX tools, or simply code it out yourself.
This software makes it impossible to do the latter. Its irritating, frustrating debugger doesn't catch any of the bugs for you, like a good c++ compiler (CodeBlocks...Free) will.
I hate this software, get a free compiler, and man up to learn C++
Junk 2006-10-29
I bought this, installed it, patched it, and then started going through the rather incomplete and disorganized documentation. The examples I played around with all worked fine. I started writing my own program, a simple math game with basic sprites and speech. I wrote a simple speech and graphics routine, which mostly worked. I wanted to try to figure out why one of my functions was going into an infinite loop and so I started the Debug mode, so I could watch what the variables were doing (very simple, basic, and common programming practice). Blat - debug mode crashes. Debug mode works on much simpler programs and for the few examples I tried out, but on my 200 line routine it generates exceptions. After the crash, I opened my project and found that everything I had written in my source had been reverted to an old version. I know for a fact that it was saved many times since then, but for some reason it decided to recall an old version for loading, as if all my Saves after an arbitrary point never happened. If I can't run debug mode on my programs or save my sources, then what's the point of this software? Complete and total buggy garbage.
You need other resources 2006-08-05
DarkBasic Professional has a nicely written manual and is pretty powerful. If you're looking to make a Quake-like game, you may be dissappointed to find that it does not have a graphics editor or a map editor. Those you are going to have to purchase (or download) separately. It would be nice if there was an OpenSource graphics suite available.
Powerful, easy to use game development 2006-03-11
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.
Just recieved my copy of DarkBasic pro AND.... 2006-01-18
I give the DB Pro 5 stars, but I am totally disappointed in Amazon.com and The Gamecreaters, heres why
The first thing I noticed is my box is different than that shown here... http://darkbasicpro.thegamecreators.com
I didnt recieve any of the free software stated in the link above
I cant find the
Over 45 Demo's
Over 25 Tutorials
Over 600 Textures
Over 120 Sound Effects
900 3D Models
That is stated here...
http://darkbasic.thegamecreators.com/
I applied the .59 upgrade patch and now my program wont start. It says its missing MSVCR71.dll file.
The original version was 1.05
I cant believe the darkbasic.com is advertising this product, yet Amazon.com is shipping some ancient version. Hopefully I will be able to resolve this issue...
