DarkBASIC Professional
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DarkBASIC Professional is a powerful BASIC dialect targeted specifically at 2D and 3D game development. It is available commercially from software company The Game Creators and is an offshoot of their original DarkBASIC programming language.
"DBPro" uses DirectX 8–9c for most of its functionality unlike the original DarkBASIC which used DirectX 7. Other additions include better support for multiplayer, BSP level support, bump/sphere/light mapping, pixel/vertex shaders, better interfaces to external DLLs, advanced sprite commands using 3D to render them quickly in 2D, a particle system, and built-in queue/stack manipulation.
DarkBASIC Pro also allows the use of multiple camera viewpoints, and uses machine level compilation to become faster than DarkBASIC.
The latest version currently is version 5.9. It, in particular, adds some very useful ODE Physics commands, such as bouncing.
Dark SDK is available for those who prefer to use C++ in order to access the DarkBasic Professional engine. Currently Visual Studio 6 and Visual Studio .Net 2003 are supported, both of which require the DirectX 9 SDK to be installed.
With Visual Studio 6, it is only possible to use up to the December 2004 SDK, whilst .Net 2003 can use up to the latest SDK.
It is estimated there is a 150-200% speed increase when using Dark SDK.
For the past three years, a DBPro convention has been held in Chichester, England. The 2006 convention, has been confirmed as being held in Chichester too, after other places were rejected.
Sample Code
rem Create a cube and rotate it on the Y-Axis rem Create the cube with the identifier number 1, and size 100 MAKE OBJECT CUBE 1,100 rem Signals the start of a loop DO rem Take the y-angle of the object and add 0.1 to it YROTATE OBJECT 1,OBJECT ANGLE Y(1) + 0.1 rem Signals the end of the loop, and go back to "Do" LOOP
See also: DarkMatter