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Hi

I havn't been able to download Visual Studio 2008 yet but I am very interested and curious about Dark GDK. I shall be downloading Visual 2008 on Tuesday, but in anticipation I have a few questions that I would be very grateful if you could answer please.

1) Is it essentially a games-engine like Irrlicht, Ogre etc ?

2) Can it be used with, say BloodShed Dev C++ ?

3) Is it as comprehensive as 3D Games Studio's acknex games-engine, I may well up buying this as it seem very easy to use and well supported. I have to say, the DarkBasic Pro demo looks very good but I have a problem with the idea of the Basic language. ?

4) Why is it free ?

5) Are there any good tutorials (I noted that there are some excellent Dark Basic tutorials)

I am really keen to find out about this, I suppose if Microsoft are involved, it must be good.

Thanks

Hey luxgud

The GDK is a games-engine, but it's much more than Irrlicht, Ogre, ect, in the sense that those forementioned engines are really just rendering engines, whereas Dark GDK handles rendering, plus everything else you'd expect from a professional engine, such as collision, multiplayer, sound/music, file handling, and input (to name a few).

It can't (as yet) be used with anything but VC++ 2008

A few years back I was about to buy the A6 version of the 3D Games Studio, but instead bought DBPro, and yes it wasn't easy at first, because I'd had absolutely no experience of programming before, but with a little help from the forums, reading up on reference books and using a bit of common sense (I want to make a cube -> "Make Object Cube"), I got into it and found it the easiest language I've ever used so far. Using the Dark GDK is essentially no different, you just need a basic amount of experience/knowledge of C++, and as 3DGS uses a C syntax scripting approach, I doubt that's of any concern.
As a bottom line, Dark GDK can potentially do anything that the A7 engine can do, and more. Because the GDK is in a C++ environment, you can use just about any library you come across and integrate them together, and with the available library's direct from TGC (such as Dark Physics and Dark AI) you've got a great amount of power and you still end up spending less money that if you went for 3DGS.

It's free for non-commercial use, any commercial projects require you to part with cash for a licence, but as you'd (hopefully) have already created the game ready for a commercial market by the time you'd need it, that won't matter much.

As the Dark GDK is very much like DBPro, it's quite easy to use a lot of the DBPro tutorials and apply them to the GDK with a little tweaking. Besides the GDK comes with a few tutorials to get you started anyway, and there's also the forums, which have always been and always will be my favourite and best source of programming knowledge and help.

To sum it up; Dark GDK is pretty godly, and is incredibly easy and helpful for beginners and experienced programmers alike.

Hope that helped a little...

TZ

Hello Luxgud, and welcome to the forums!

I highly encourage you to give the DarkGDK a shot, as it's quite the high quality framework, and it's hard to beat the quality of Visual Studio IMHO.

However I would like to clarify something, as it's important. Ogre, Irrlicht and the DarkGDK are not game engines. Ogre and Irrlicht are rendering engines. They have no physics, input, audio or networking support. They simply put graphics on the screen. In contrast the DarkGDK does support all of that and then some, but it still is not a "game engine". It has no entity support of any kind, or any set up for game levels or anything of the kind (these are just a couple of examples). The DarkGDK, much like DarkBasic is a Game Framework.

While this does sound like it makes the DarkGDK more limited, it's actually quite the opposite. The DarkGDK comes with all the features you need in order to write a game, or game engine, in a very short amount of time. It's quite the remarkable tool and I would highly recommend it. I've been writing games for around two years now and have tried out a good few game engines and frameworks (Torque for example) and very few allow me to simply "get to work" the way the DarkGDK did. I found the learning curve to be extremely easy and felt I had a fairly good understanding of it's capabilities and usage within a few short hours. I'd recommend it over just about anything.

There are plenty of resources around on the forums for the DarkGDK, or for DarkBasic. There's a wealth of information to be found, you just have to do some digging now and then. The documentation is lacking in places, but it has been steadily getting better, and you can generally piece together what you need with a couple of tests.

I'm not entirely sure why the DarkGDK is free, I don't believe it used to be. Maybe another member who's been around a lot longer than myself could answer that? If I were to venture a guess, I'd assume it has to do with some marketing promotion from Microsoft, in an attempt to push Visual Studio.

Now, as for DevC++, no I'm afraid it does not work with DevC++ in any way. And on that note I'd highly recommend against using DevC++ anyway. It's buggy and hasn't been updated since 2004. It also ships with a very old version of MinGW (GCC). If you do prefer to use the MinGW tool chain then I'd highly recommend looking into Eclipse with the CDT plugin, or Code::Blocks. Both are under constant development and provide all the features of DevC++ and then some.

-Piro

Hi guys

Great responses, thanks !

[edit]Browser Error - posted in wrong thread[/edit] Sorry.