Dark Basic Professional Review

Dark Basic - An excellent programming language

Submitted by Grayzag on Tue, 2006-09-05 12:02.
Author's Product Rating:
Ease of Use: 
Effectiveness: 
Help/Support: 
The lowest price: 62.99$
You can buy it at RegNow for that price.
Pros:
easy to use cheap
Cons:
need to buy more dll's for it not as flexible as C
Review:

Here are some of the basic feature of this Programming language:
eneral 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.

This is an extremely good tool, one that is easy for both beginners and experienced programmers alike. You can make your on quality FPS in under a year! The price, even though it may seem expensive, is actually extremely good for a programming suite. Microsoft Visul Basic can be seen over $300.

The main problem is to get alot of things to happen, you need to buy more dll's for it, andthe prices of these can mount up.

One extremely useful feature is the First Person Creation (FPC) code that lets you write your own FPS games easily.

Although more flexible languages such as C++ are better, this is easily the best of the BASIC lineup, surpassing even Blitz3D.

This is so easy to use. To rotate a cube in other languages you could write tens of lines of code, while this is all you have to write in DarkBasic:

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

I once did the same thing in Visual Basic. And guess what?
It took me aproxamately 60 lines of code. Nothing else currently on the market does 3D stuff that easy. And yes, I am counting Blitz3D.

Conclusion:

This is an excellent language, and i reccomend you buy it. At the end of the trial I will probably go out and purchase it, it is THAT good!