Dark Basic Professional Review

The primary reason that Darkbasic pro is such a staple of easy, individual game development, is the books. They have books everywhere. It is a triumph of marketing.

The actual product, however, is lackluster. It has a decently featureful 3d engine, though not as fast as some, the ease of use makes up for this.

The language itself, and api paradigm are quite ill-planned. In attempt at making the syntax more like english, they only get quite verbose and unwieldy syntax. For example, rather than v = obj.CollisionCenter, you would write:


centerx# = object collision center x(obj)
centery# = object collision center y(obj)
centerz# = object collision center z(obj)


oh, you want to add a vector to that? Just use DB's convenient 3d math </sarcasm>


null = make vector3(1)
set vector3 1, centerx#, centery#, centerz#
null = make vector3(2)
set vector3 2, 1.0, 2.0, 0.0
null = make vector3(3)
add vector3 3 1 2


Reminds me of the good old days of assembly code. Sort of. Not really.

In any reasonable language you'd do something like:

obj.Center + Vector(3, 1, 2)

Darkbasic pro is not a reasonable language.