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Hi

I was wondering where I could find some tutorials for dark GDK.

I have downloaded the software but I havent installed it yet.

Thanks in advance for any help you can give to me.

The tutorials are pretty much tied up what's been installed. Look in the Program Files directory under the "The Game Creators" folder for some PDF files that explain the code for some of the demos. The help file, a CHM file under Documentation, provides the function explanations.

That said, I could probably stand to see a bit more of an overview and an explanation of how and when things are drawn to the screen for 2D games. But that's over in another thread.

The thing is, TGC is providing the GDK free of charge and the documentation is a lot more than I've seen at some other companies that just document existing demo code. Maybe if we all got a thread going where we posted our epiphanies ...?

Thanks so much for replying Lilith

I'll look in the product then.

I still have some confusion over the diference between Dark GDK and GDK.net

are they the same or different? I just found something that suggests that maybe one is for C sharp and the other is for C++ is that right.

I need a C++ one LOL so I suppose if the above proves to be the case ill need the non .net version. is that right ?

GDK .NET falls under a different paradigm than what you may have been working with so far. .NET actually refers more to the framework in which you program rather than the language. As I understand it, in a .NET environment you have certain functionality that's provided for you such that you could write in one of several languages (C#, Visual Basic, C++ (I think)) but use the same modules for all the languages to achieve your results. Ostensibly .NET allows you to write code that will work in any OS that supports .NET functionality. Your programs are generated in a sort of code that gets compiled "just in time" to run. If the OS supports it, the program is read in, compiled for the environment it's running in and executed.

I'm still relatively new to .NET and almost entirely from the C# side of things since that's what XNA uses. I am so not into Visual Basic since I found C/C++ to be more flexible and easier to debug so I can't speak to that particular language.

The downside to .NET, as I see it, is that the .NET infrastructure needs to be installed on the workstation on which you want to run the program. This should be true of most newer installs of Windows but the version (currently up to 3.5, I believe) may not be up to date for the version the code was compiled under.

.NET code likely will run a bit slower than your C++ code but it will probably run fast enough that you really won't notice it. What I think I'd like about GDK .NET is that it may be more constrained to provide return codes and rely mostly on things that are established in .NET (file IO for example) rather than the DB functions. Then again, maybe not.

so GDK.NET will allow me to use C++ ?

...that and you can code really sloppy - as it handles all the memory relasing, scope, etc. This is a two edge sword... You can crankout code usually without worry of mem leaks... but ... you also lose explicit control of KILLING (most) objects though - in that many objects don't have a public destructor... so you can only set them to null or whatever so they are queued for garbage collection. (You can manually cause garbage collection however)

.Net is great for getting things done faster - but it has caveats like Lilith has mentioned - and C++ is harder - but gives you the most horsepwoer and your code is compiled to machine language - not distributed in this intermediate (EASILY) reverse engineerable state. (You can obfusciate... to sorta make that harder to do... but reverse engineering Machine code is all the more difficult to your benefit!)

nuff of my techno babble...got work to do.