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So about five years I took advantage of the Dark Game Studio offer and purchased the product along with FPSC the first.

At the time I was really only interested in some of the additional programs on the disc which could be used with FPSC.

However lately and with all the email I have been getting about AppGameKit I decided to revisit the whole idea and install it along with Dark Basic Pro.

So first off I am told I need Direct X SDK and Visual Studio C++, so I dutifully download them. Thinking I was wise I decided to get Visual C++ 2010 rather than 2013. Having installed VSC++ okay I then try to install the Direct X SDK only to find it has an error to do with the wrong or incompatible version of the Visual C++ Redistributable.

So remove the offending 2010 versions of the X86 and X64 files and continue installing the SDK.

After its all in their I then try to install the GDK only to once again be told that I need VSC++ and Direct X SDK 2007 neither of which can be found. So knowing that I had installed then I decided to continue.

Only to get a message saying that I needed to run the C++ compiler once before installing the GDK.

But I have no program that I have created and I can't find the compiler in the 2010 C++ studio anyway.

This is on top of having to shut down UAC just to install the programs from the disk.

And I thought this was supposed to be easy, silly me.

So to all you devs out their is their someone who can help a NOOB get a grip on wtf I do next.

Thanks

Jim Barnes

I don't quite recall the installation procedure, however...


You can just write, compile and run a C++ console "Hello World" program for that. I think all this does is add the path to the VC installation directory to the registry / your path environment variable. It is also completely unnecessary unless you want to use the wizard installer which has worked once out of 5+ times for me I think. Just let the installer unpack all the library files to C:\Program Files\The Game Creators\DarkGDK or whatever, then create a new blank (C++) project in Visual Studio. Link to the libraries and include files from DarkGDK (from whereever you had it "installed" / extracted). You also need to link to the DirectX SDK; there are versions of GDK that use the June 2010 DirectX 9 SDK and an older version which I think uses DirectX 9 SDK August 2007, but it may be another version (just use the latest one if you're planning to use Visual Studio 2010 anyway, less hassle that way).
Ensure that your libraries are linked in order; it should be (if I recall correctly):
- Windows
- DirectX
- DarkGDK

I don't know how readable that is (sleep deprevation and a head full of tedious paper writing for the win), but I hope it will help

The DarkGDK page is here. There is a link to the download page at the bottom of the black portion:
http://www.thegamecreators.com/?m=view_product&id=2128

You can still download the DirectX 2007 SDK from there.

I see they've now added the commercial license and DarkGDK.net, both for free (that's new).

"...free for you to download and use as you like..."

What's the difference (technically) between "3) Dark GDK" and "4) Dark GDK Shareware edition (DarkGDK_162c_Shareware.exe -- 30 august 2006)"?
Logo of TheGameCreators on the initial screen, or something else?
I'm afraid to check ...

I was wondering that too. I used uniExtract to extract the files within. uniExtract is good to extract files from installers and .exe's without executing the installer/extractor code. What came out appears to be the 2006 version of DarkGDK. A readme file says it's DarkGDK 1.6.2c. Here's the main directory structure:



The DarkGDK.chm documentation file is a different version than the regularly distributed one. There's an additional section called "Getting Started", which tells how to set up DarkGDK with Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio .NET 2003.

The samples Viewer seems to have the same samples as the 2007 version, except this one has one more: An "Animation Showcase", which shows off the functional animation module that was disabled in and after 2007 for some reason (and of course re-enabled by me in the latest source-code version in the repository).

While running the Samples Viewer, and running the Animation Showcase, I switched windows, and my computer froze - not even the mouse would move. Had to do a hard-reboot. Fortunately FireFox remembered my page here and message typed so far - that's a first.

P.S.
It seems the DirectX requirement is summer 2005, or greater. SO this is pre-2007 DirectX, which I suppose would be obvious.

This message shows when you click Upgrade (on the site):



So apparently there's no need to install "commercial license" version, because it all is now.