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Engine Details

DarkBASIC Pro

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(19 votes)

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DarkBASIC Professional is an advanced games development package built on the BASIC language currently available. It makes it as easy to incorporate all of the special features and effects you see in todays games and offers the benefits of Microsoft's DirectX 9 technology.

Author

The Game Creators Ltd.

Graphics API

DirectX

Operating Systems

Windows

Programming Language

BASIC

Status

Productive/Stable

Documentation

Yes

Features

General Features

Plug-in Architecture, Save/Load System:

•	Command Line Interface
•	Creates .EXE files with the option of encryption and compression
•	BASIC compiler produces 100% machine code
•	Expandable - write your own DLLs with the free SDK

Scripting

Built-in Editors

Windows based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) with integrated debugging

Physics

Collision Detection:

•	Polygon collision detection

Lighting

Per-vertex, Lightmapping:

•	Lights (Omni, Spot, Directional)

Shadows

Shadow Volume:

Texturing

Basic, Multi-texturing, Bumpmapping, Mipmapping:

•	Supports BMP, JPEG, DirectDraw surfaces, PNG, DIB and TGA image formats

Shaders

Vertex, Pixel:

Scene Management

General, BSP, Occlusion Culling, PVS:

•	Supports Half-life and Quake BSP loading
•	Nodetree Optimisation

Animation

Skeletal Animation:

Meshes

Mesh Loading:

•	Low level access of object data
•	Supports MDL, MD2, MD3, DirectX .X, 3DS models

Special Effects

Environment Mapping, Lens Flares, Billboarding, Particle System, Sky, Fog:

•	Sphere mapping and cubic mapping
•	True Reflections

Terrain

Rendering, CLOD:

Networking System

Client-Server, Peer-to-Peer:

•	Create multi-player games (LAN and Internet)

Sound & Video

2D Sound, 3D Sound:

•	Supports WAV, WMA, AIFF, AU, SND, MP3, MIDI, CD-Audio, AVI, MPEG, DVD, Indeo, and Cinepak formats.

Rendering

Fixed-function, Render-to-Texture:

•	Multiple cameras
•	Cartoon shading
•	Rainbow rendering
•	Advanced 2D features that supports things like mirroring, sprites, animation, scaling, etc.

Features:

Ease of Use:

Stability:

Support:

Date Added

Mon, 26 Jul 2004

Last Updated

Fri, 5 Aug 2005

There are currently 17 reviews for this engine

License Name	Price	Source Code	Comments
Other/Custom	$89.99	No

Screenshots:

Member Reviews

NOTE: The ratings and reviews below reflect the opinions of their respective authors and as such, do not reflect the opinions of DevMaster.net or its staff. The reviews are not moderated and some are completely inaccurate. Therefore, most reviews should be taken with a grain of salt. If you find any inaccurate or inappropriate reviews, let us know by stating in detail why you think the review should be removed and any links/documents that support your contention.

Good for all!

Posted by: ProgrammerXtreme at Oct 23, 2004

I recommend it for pros, and begginners! Just because it says "pro" does not make it hard! If you want to make awsoeme games within 1 year, I recommend it!

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Descent engine.

Posted by: BlinkerGuy at May 3, 2005

This is a pretty descent game creator here.

It's fairly a cheap and an extremely simple game creator even for a beginner.

But the problem is, the extra packs that costs more money to get the extra DLL to get the job done the correct way. Yeah most of their 3rd party tools costs an arm an a leg.

And gee, I really wish darkbasic did OpenGL rendering as well.

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Recently upgraded

Posted by: zircher at Apr 28, 2005

Just a quick note that Dark Basic Pro has recently been upgraded to version 5.8. This version has a lot of bug fixes and some new features added to the Dark Basic Pro engine. I think there is a markedly improved stability in part due to a lot of the FPSC (First Person Shoot Creator) code that was ported to DBP as part of the upgrade. So, there has been above average testing done on those new components.
--
TAZ

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Acceptable

Posted by: FlamingHawk at May 14, 2005

Although I'd stick with a more flexible language such as C#, Visual Basic, or C++; DBPro is probably the best BASIC variation ever created. In the past, Blitz3D was more popular and easier to use, but now that the debugger is excellent; TGC has it's own file format, and the support for DirectX 9.0c and shaders; DBPro is finally better than Blitz Research's aging DirectX 7.0 engines.

ALL I CAN SAY: A GREAT BASIC ENGINE!!

Good Job TGC!!

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Love it! Love it!

Posted by: games2live at Mar 28, 2006

DarkBASIC Pro is an excellent BASIC compiler that compiles real executables!

I'm not rating everything 5/5 just because I use it.

The functions are extremely easy to use. For example, the following FOUR lines of code will rotate a 3D cube.

MAKE OBJECT CUBE 1,100
DO
YROTATE OBJECT 1,OBJECT ANGLE Y(1)+.8
LOOP

Let's go step-by-step through this code. Line 1 make a cube, named 1, and 100 by 100 dimensions. Line 2 is the typical start of a DO LOOP. Line 3 rotates the cube. Line 4 is the typiccal end of the DO LOOP.

Now, that's not so hard, is it?

I once did the same thing in Visual Basic. And guess what?
It took me aproxamately 63 lines of code. Nothing else currently on the market does 3D stuff that easy. And yes, I am counting Blitz3D.

Basicly, I highly recommend this product. You can download the trial version at http://darkbasicpro.thegamecreators.com/?f=trial. Who knows? Maybe YOU will be the one to change the gaming world...

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Good for starters

Posted by: The Mastermind at Feb 13, 2006

I have had DarkBasic Pro since 2003, and here is my opinion:

DarkBasic Pro is much better than DarkBasic. I think that the engine is very easy to use, and there are lots of tools out for it. The problem is that you need to purchase many of these tools to be worthwhile. I have resently switched over to Torque, and I think that the Torque engine is much harder at first to learn, but has better support, stability, performance, and features. I think that DarkBasic should have had a built in world editor, maybe some extra GUI features and other things that you would need from the DLLs. There are the basics included with DarkBasic Pro, but nothing more. You must build everything from the ground up. I actually like this package better than BlitzBasic since Blitz's DX7 is aging and DBP has much more support.

I would have liked to see DBP as an authoring system like Torque or 3DGS. Overall, I think that you can get the job done once you purchase other tools, dlls, and packages to work along side DBP. The BASIC language is easy to use for beginners and the package is very stable. I would have liked to see a better community though.

Overall, if you are a beginner and would like to have a package that comes with 3d models and great ease, this is a must buy. If you are looking for more of an authoring system or are more advanced, go to Torque.

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Great game Oriented “basic” language!

Posted by: at May 6, 2007

Generally, DBpro is not an engine likes unreal or torque, but a "basic" language with easy to used command, not support OOP, but you can simulate OOP.

The disadvantage for DBpro: it has many advanced features, but some of them are hard to use for the poor performance; for my experience, it has a not very good shadow system; some command names are very long.

The advantage for DBpro: Many useful 3rd party packs provided almost everything like Animation blending , professional collision system ,LUA script…in fact, without them DBpro will be very hard to do something; Support Unicode; A relative completed help, but missed some commands; A big community, if you have questions ,maybe you can search in the forum ,many answers already there; TGC is active !

DBpro is an easy to used and game Oriented “basic” language, although there are many features already there, you still need to code from first line to the end, but this is just the reason why I love DBpro .you can control and design any game you want, not like some engines, you have to modify the existing game, just made many copies.

I think DBpro itself is very stable, but something if you are not careful, you will hard to debug when you program goes big. Eg: ”Baisc” do not check the variables if you have declared, for example ,you have a global variable “time”, but you input it to “tima” in some where, ”Basic” will create a new variable “tima” and initialize it to zero ,sometimes ,this is not hurt too much ,you do not find this error ,when you program becomes bigger ,some problems occur (crash or something strange) ,that’s really hard to find the problems you took before . so that ,don’t use many globals ,instead to create a TYPE ,containing the globals you need ,the program will catch the variables you do not declared in the TYPE .

I used 3D world studio to create level, and used “PandaDirectXMaxExporter” (its free, http://www.andytather.co.uk/Panda/directxmax.aspx )to export .X models to my game. TGC did not provide a exporter plug-in.

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Good, but starting to slip

Posted by: MrTAToad at May 13, 2006

Update 6 is now finally out, and its certainly much better than it was - a lot more people were beta testing the updates this time, which was good.

Unfortunately, it still takes time to get the updates out - getting this out promptly is not one of TGC good areas.

Full of the latest features, although at the moment, a lot are hard to use, due to the lack of decent documentation (which should start to be upgraded soon).

Help is usually very quick.

The only real downside is the speed of the final execution - programs are not optimised, and, with heavy scenes can slow down a lot.

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how

Posted by: darkdonkey at Sep 12, 2006

people huw managed to aktually make something 3d in this engine are truelly magic, the help files are basicly the crapest ive seen there are no usefull tutorials.

LETS MAKE THIS CLEAR ITS CRAP!

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Unfortunately

Posted by: WoOdSpEaK StUdIoS at Sep 28, 2006

This development suite for Windows unfortunately leaves much to be desired. Although it is in the language BASIC, thus should be useful for begginers, the insufficient support cancels this out easily.

Despite the actual software and system being stable, it will take years until you are devoloping games that are "playable", due to the unhelpful support and unobjective (and quite rude) members of the forums.

For a commercial engine, this software does include the average particle systems and file loaders, but the commands are unstable and it will take HOURS of coding to create a basic sphere that appears on the screen.

I'm begging you, DO NOT BUY THIS ENGINE. The "Indie" version of Torque is only $11 more, but around 500 times better.

You have been warned.

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Excuse Me?

Posted by: Draco at Jan 31, 2007

Hours of coding to make a sphere?

Try
MAKE OBJECT SPHERE Object Number, Size

Gee, not so dang hard. Try actually looking in the commands listing before announcing something is harder than it needs to be.

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Reasonable

Posted by: gdev2 at Oct 23, 2008

features: 5
Despite good features are separate packages to buy, they at least exist!

Ease of use: 5
Lots of APIs to make you concentrate on the game programming. You need to know programming.

stability: 2.5
Not a good IDE, and is buggy, but I haven't seen any serious bug with APIs. Compiler doesn't have minimum requirements for correct computing as it doesn't detects unused or undefined variables.

support: 4
If you try to get what you want, you will, from forum or direct question.

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It's very good...

Posted by: meng_thor at Feb 28, 2007

So far when i used to have this demo it was like a dream, but now about like 5 years later i'm 23 now and i had made enough money to buy Darkbasic Pro and it still is good and don't let the BASIC interface turn you off because this thing can do much better than most sotftware i've seen. This is the only BASIC language that can handle today's graphics and etc. Now DarkBASIC 10 is in the process and it has even more of today's graphics. Blitz is too way behind on graphics and their programming seems to take a little longer than DarkBASIC Pros. The software is easy to use and the support is excellent especially from the forums. The features are incredible, but i heard that the pyros and special effects don't work a little, but other than that it works perfectly.

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Powerfull Game Engine

Posted by: wachikung at Mar 2, 2007

Today, Dark Baic Pro is Version 1.065. It's very stable. Over 3 year I use it to made many game. used shader and online game. It's very easy and powerfull game engine.
my game=> http://forum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=97653&b=32
ps.sorry for bad english.

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Very Bad

Posted by: combine at Mar 9, 2007

I have used DBpro for 1 month.
My Statement : DBpro is very poor, its not fast and the Programer makes more Addons then they fix the Bugs.

If u look on Eyecandy is DBpro maybe ok, but for Really project is Dbpro terrible.

If u need a Basic look to B3D, it has lots auf power,too.

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Good for personal use, not good for commercial.

Posted by: Person_99 at Apr 16, 2007

This is quite a good BASIC engine. With some neat features like cartoon shading, bump mapping, 3d sound, and stuff like that, this is VERY good for a basic engine.
It is quite easy to use, especially for a programming language.
It however, is not too stable, you have to save very often, because it tends to crash and things like that.

TGC leaves it's products deserted, and leaves the programs the company makes with a forum in the TGC forums.
The forums are quite active, since FPS Creator.

The updates for Darkbasic and Darkbasic Professional are rare. The only reason you'd get an update is when a new product made in a new version of Darkbasic, so they release the new version.

This engine does not have any "Next-gen" stuff, like bloom lighting, ragdoll physics, or anything like that in physics. You'd have to program it yourself.

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Mildly useful, extremely frustrating

Posted by: ppardee at Apr 29, 2007

This engine is my first foray into game programming, though I have programmed general applications in the past.

I understand that it takes a lot more code to get C++ working with DirectX, but the lack of stability in the IDE and the unpredictable results make the ease of use go away. I have the “New, improved” IDE, and there were several times that it wouldn't save my work. I actually had to cut and paste the code to a note pad window, close the IDE, reopen it, and THEN I could save it.

There were also several occasions where the text I typed no longer appeared on the screen.

If you want to change the system options, it deletes all previously selected options. Adding a line concatenation and a comment to the line ignores everything on previous lines. If you add a apostrophe instead of a reverse apostrophe it ignores the line and does not give any errors. In fact, with that 'feature' it will even ignore everything BEFORE that apostrophe.

You cannot declare a variable and define it with anything other than a constant in the same line.

If you have never programmed before, this may be an acceptable tool to use. If you have any experience programming, I would recommend taking the time to learn to use DirectX with C++. It will take you the same amount of time as it would to learn DB considering the IDE/Complier bugs.

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